Sirens
by gypsum
Summary: Lennie Briscoe dealing with the car accident. They keep telling me I have a psych degree.


Author's note: I first wrote and published this story here about eight years ago while I was an undergraduate. At the time I was obsessed with Law & Order and had probably seen every episode (of the original that is) at least once. In those days I wanted to go to law school and become a prosecutor myself. Life has changed significantly since then. I have done quite a lot, including living in New York City and working as an intern for a summer in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and then several years later, deciding DA's offices, law school, and the US for that matter, weren't for me at all and moving to Scotland, where I have been living for the past three years. While procrastinating on work I should be doing, I decided to have a wee look at this story to see what the perspective and experience gained in eight years had done to it. It's the distance acquired from living abroad, from doing work which has nothing to do with the American legal system, and from not having watched a Law & Order episode for at least three or four years. The story made a lot of sense when I was studying US law, spending a fair bit of time in New York, and watching a lot of Law & Order but I wondered, would it withstand not having any of that on hand as immediate knowledge. Overall, it's still not a bad piece of writing. But there were things about it which demanded change and re-writing, so I couldn't resist the compulsion to sort it out.

I'm pleased to see that the software at has improved so I no longer have to manually enter HTML code when switching between normal text and italics. Lastly, I hope that the new dialogue I wrote does not sound overly Glaswegian.

Detective Lennie Briscoe looked dubiously across the table at Elizabeth Olivet, thinking he had better things to do today than be here, having a conversation about his feelings with the shrink. Sure the last few weeks had been something of a rollercoaster and the last time he felt really well in himself was, admittedly, a while ago. But it wasn't that bad. Was it? Denial, as ever a better place to be than reality. The room felt smaller and more intimate than it ever felt when he used it to chat with witnesses and lawyers. The low wattage bulb barely illuminated the room. Outside it was bleak and overcast, threatening snow. Grey clouds and grey buildings and grey pavement. New York winters could make anyone contemplate jumping off a bridge. The inside of the precinct reflected the bleak city outside, the walls painted dull greens and greys, the floor dark grey linoleum. To uplift the mood even more, two law enforcement posters hung on the walls, one announcing the underreporting of domestic violence and the other warning of the dangers of dealing cocaine. A fraying sofa with olive-coloured upholstery sat along the wall under the window; while a plain table and three rickety chairs occupied the center of the room. In the corner furthest from the window sat a gunmetal gray filing cabinet that had been there since 1972, a makeshift bulletin board for flyers announcing symposia, workshops, parties, etc., or sticky notes that said things like, "Len, call property clerk."

He really did not want to be here today. He had better things to do. Uncomfortably he fretted at his nails.

If the threat of more snow, dim lights or Lennie's irritability bothered Liz Olivet, she didn't show it. A quiet woman in her forties, Liz normally served as a forensic psychiatrist, evaluating any raving lunatic the police or District Attorney sent her way. Her angular face, piercing green eyes, and thin mouth barely flickered with emotion. She had seen every form of crazy there ever was and no manifestation of the fucked up psyche surprised her anymore. He thought if he even went so far over the proverbial edge as to take his service revolver out of the holster at his hip and press it against his temple, or hers, she wouldn't bat an eyelash.

Lennie knew why he was here. Olivet knew why he was here. Admitting it meant reopening old wounds he thought were best left closed. And Olivet acted like a cop bringing a suspect into precinct for an innocent little chat; the tapdance you did when you really thought you had the perp, but you didn't want him to go crying to a lawyer yet. Not saying flat-out why he was here, but waiting with limitless patience for him to say something incriminating.

"Is this necessary, Doc?" he complained, pacing around the room. "We have several cases ready to turn into major train wrecks right now, and that's a bigger priority than me getting a fucking psychological evaluation."

"You think so?" Olivet replied serenely, as only a psychiatrist could: patient and slightly condescending.

There was an uncomfortably long pause. Lennie stopped pacing and met Olivet's eyes. Unperturbed, she held his gaze. Playing chicken, he waited too. Sometimes prolonged silence could be a more effective tool for getting information out of someone than words. After twenty-six years on the NYPD, he knew all the tricks of persuasion and interrogation as well or better than Olivet with her BS, Master's, and PhD.

He finally relented on the grounds that if he made even a half-assed effort at cooperating, he might get out of here before his shift ended. Sighing deeply, he sat down at the little table in the center of the room across from Liz, still fussing with his nails. "All right. Let's get this over with. You be honest with me, I'll be honest with you."

"Have you been honest with me, Lennie?" She stared into his face, her own face perfectly smooth and inscrutable.

"I haven't lied to you."

"You sure...?"

"Yeah..."

"So how did you cut your hand?"

That question jolted his stomach. He looked down at his left hand, sloppily wrapped from the palm to the wrist in gauze that had been decaying in an ancient first-aid kit he had discovered in his apartment. It throbbed with a steady, dull ache. He didn't answer Olivet, unable to remember with any kind of clarity how he'd cut his hand. It was a fuzzy space in his head, just like the space a night of too much drink left in its wake, but he hadn't been drinking. That space, the mystery of it since he hadn't tasted a drop of booze for over a year now, gnawed away at his denial.

Olivet watched him as if he was a suspect in a lineup and nodded slowly, in the same way a witness who thought she recognized a face in the lineup might nod.

"What do you remember about the accident?"

Lennie shrugged, suspicious of her sudden topic change. _The freakin' car wreck again_. "Is it important? Everyone knows what happened."

"I want to know what you remember."

He stood up and paced around the room again, massaging his forehead with his fingers. The old accident was on his list of "subjects-to-avoid". That entire day -- the execution in the morning, his daughter Cathy's unmitigated contempt in the afternoon, and he, depressed as hell, wandering into that bar in the evening -- wasn't something he wanted to talk about. Especially with a shrink. Jesus. This was why Olivet wanted to interview him? It happened over a year ago. Lennie didn't like admitting he'd plummeted off the wagon then because he'd had a lousy day and that he had hit the ground hard. Admitting that much inevitably lead to blaming himself for the death of the young pretty district attorney who drove him home that night. If he hadn't been drunk, Claire wouldn't have had to drive him home, and then she would not have been in that intersection at the exact second an out-of-control SUV careened into her little car, killing her instantaneously and leaving Lennie very much alive, with only a few torn muscles and wrenched vertebrae in his lower back. The wonder to him now was that he found himself worth saving. After the accident, he'd returned to AA meetings and pieced himself back together. And if anyone looked down and chanced to see him struggling to clamber back on the wagon and go on with life, they would have seen how even an old cynical cop who had seen too much death, a recovering alcoholic who couldn't hold a marriage together and who alienated his children, believed his own life was precious.

He shot at Liz, "I was drunk. Claire Kincaid drove me home. We got hit by another car. I saw that she was dead. Next thing I know, I'm in an ambulance."

"Is that all?"

Folding his arms across his chest, he shot her an irascible glare. Yes, that was all, dammit. What more information could she want that wasn't already in the police reports from the accident scene?

Olivet frowned skeptically, but she didn't push the topic any further. "Okay, Lennie... Four weeks ago... You remember what was going on four weeks ago?"

Another damn topic change. "A lot went on four weeks ago. A lot always goes on. What's so important about four weeks ago?" He took his seat at the table again.

"The people you work with expressed concern about you four weeks ago."

"Did they?" He said warily.

"I'm here at Lieutenant Van Buren's request, Lennie. Now, do you think they had reason to be concerned?"

He studied his hands on the table and muttered under his breath, without thinking, "There was that DA..."

"What about the DA?"

"Didn't you read about it? Nicholas Ferrin, the King's County Assistant DA."

Olivet shrugged noncommittally. "What happened with the DA?"

"It was one of our cases..."

"You mentioned that specifically. Why?"

"I don't know why I mentioned the DA specifically. I said we were busy. It was just one of our cases. I mean, we had that NYU student beaten to death in the back alley, a gang rape, two sort of average murders -- you know, husbands killing wives, wives killing husbands -- that corruption case, I had to testify for several days at the Boucher trial. There was this attempted murder case that was turning into a clusterfuck."

"You said they were talking about the DA," Liz persisted.

"It didn't mean anything. It was just one of our cases."

"So you say. What happened four weeks ago?"

_Lennie's beeper interrupted Jack McCoy's speech, and the prosecutor made an ugly face, scowling as if the beeper had personally insulted him._

_"We need to finish this witness prep," McCoy said, his voice starting at a low growl and sliding into a near falsetto, the way it always did when he was pissed off about something. When something or somebody irritated him, the old prosecutor, with his fierce eyes and sharp nose, looked like a hawk eyeing potential prey. Even when he wasn't being surly – which was almost never these days -- he looked like a hawk. "You have to testify tomorrow."_

_"And we can finish it after I call my partner and see what's up. I'm using your phone," Lennie said, unfazed by the cantankerous lawyer. He stood up and walked out of the conference room, ignoring Jack's virulent glare following him out the door._

_Down the hall in McCoy's office, Lennie dialed the number displayed on the pager, Reynaldo Curtis' cell phone. His young, dashingly handsome, and anal-retentive-as-hell partner. Rey liked those damned cell phones and any other electronic gadget. Lennie hated cell phones, computers, and most anything else related to technology, but especially cell phones. For most people, cell phones seemed like a way of announcing their progress, hour by hour, through the world; a way for people who never could shut up to keep talking, even when there wasn't anyone who wanted to listen. Or worse, a way for people whom you didn't want to speak with to contact you wherever you happened to be. _

_Rey answered the phone promptly. "We got kind of an ugly homicide here."_

_"Kind of?" Lennie said, looking despondently out the door towards the conference room where McCoy waited. "I'm in the middle of a witness prep session, and you know what a pain in the ass McCoy is. Can you deal with it?"_

_At that moment, McCoy joined him in the office, cocked an eyebrow at him, and pretended to read a thick book titled, 'Manual for Trial Lawyers.'_

_"Don't I," Rey replied. "But this one's really bad. It's a mess. You should probably be here."_

_Not "kind of ugly" at all then. "Where?"_

_"It's near 120th and Broadway."_

_"To hell with it. McCoy can wait." Rey was bright, thorough, but insofar as Lennie was concerned, still young and inexperienced in the death investigation business. He hung up and said to Jack, "I gotta go."_

_Jack puffed up like an adder. "You have to go now?"_

_"There's a homicide I gotta go check out."_

_"Can't Curtis deal with it?" Jack affected a tired, put-upon expression. McCoy probably felt tired and put-upon -- who in the justice system didn't? But Jack was better at looking like he wanted to slit your throat._

_Lennie shrugged. "He says it's bad. I have to go."_

_"'It's bad?'" Jack sneered. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"_

_"I'll let you know after I see it."_

_McCoy sputtered and fumed but he couldn't prevent Lennie from leaving unless he physically pinned the detective down. But Jack, in spite of his temper and histrionic tendencies, was one of the most non-violent people Lennie knew, a guy who had marched for peace during Vietnam while Lennie was a corporal in the army, who thought every problem could be solved by an argument, even if that meant a very loud one. Jack also knew Lennie always had a sidearm on him. Fat chance of that happening, McCoy. Jack contented himself with scowling._

_Lennie could feel the lawyer's sharp black eyes boring holes through his back as he left. To hell with him. Lennie walked away from the office, and the feeling of McCoy's gaze gouging holes in his back didn't go away until he reached the elevator around the corner. Why McCoy was bothering him more than lawyers usually annoyed him, he couldn't say; perhaps Lennie was more tired and stressed out than he thought, or maybe Jack felt tired and stressed out and more obstreperous than usual. But none of their cases at the moment were train wrecks yet -- that being all relative, of course. There were always problematic cases, some just to a lesser degree than others._

_Lennie rode down the elevator with an ADA he sort of recognized, like he'd seen her floating around the office or at a party, two defense attorneys, and a paralegal. The ADA's name escaped him, but she had a distinctive Texas twang -- you just didn't hear many Texas accents in New York. The paralegal and the district attorney were in the midst of a heated discussion about Rudy Guiliani. The ADA thought he was the best thing that ever happened to New York City. The young paralegal thought he was a fascist. Lennie thought he had seen so many mayors come and go over the years that he didn't care anymore, but on the other hand, while Guiliani might be a corrupt, slimy son of a bitch, he had really cleaned the city up._

_Lennie interjected, "He's not done a bad job. You should have seen what a shithole this place was in the 80s." _

_The idealistic paralegal looked offended but she kept on belabouring her point anyway. "At what expense to civil rights?"_

_Lennie shrugged. "It's not Beirut." Perspective and all that._

_The Texan ADA smiled at him, pleased she had found an ally of sorts. She was cute, he thought. No wedding ring on her finger, either. _

"_What happened to all the homeless, the drug addicts, the people they 'cleaned' up off the streets?" challenged the paralegal. "Where did they all go?"_

"_Uh, New Jersey?" Lennie raised a wry eyebrow._

"_I'm from New Jersey!"_

_Oh, well. _

"_He's been hard on crime," drawled the Texan ADA, who probably didn't give a shit about civil rights. "That's for sure."_

_Lennie thought of all the responses one could make to that but probably shouldn't. _

_The elevator's bell dinged when it landed on the first floor, and everyone dispersed, Lennie to the door and the lawyers and paralegal down the hallway into the Criminal Courts Building. Before Lennie saw anyone he knew who might want to schmooze, he ducked out of the building._

_On the opposite side of Leonard Street from the DA's office and its neighboring building -- the Louis Lefkowitz state government offices -- Worth Street, Centre Street, Lafayette Street, and Leonard Street converged into Foley Square, a paltry, prosaic square beside Washington or Union Squares, but it was clean, some care had been taken with lying concrete bricks of different shades of gray in geometric patterns and placing benches and flower boxes in tasteful locations about the square, and there was a modern art statue, a black, unidentifiable, but somewhat phallic-looking asparagus shape pointing to the sky in the middle of the square. For a "square," it was rather circular, and Centre Street cut off its northeast corner. Next to the Supreme Courthouse were more benches, flower boxes, and geometric bricks. A subway station leading to the 4 and 6 trains marked the southern edge of the square, directly across Centre Street from the US District Courthouse and 60 Centre Street Supreme Court building (Civil Term), beautiful old buildings, constructed to reflect the majesty of the Law; massive stone columns lined their front entrances at the top of flights of wide stairs, and filigreed engravings and Latin sayings were carved into the stone above the Greek columns._

_Not like the Criminal Courts Building, constructed, Lennie thought, to reflect the feelings of the people who go into it -- tired, cross, and having just discovered they're going to be spending the next twenty-five years as a guest of the state of New York. The Criminal Courts Building was ugly, a degree of ugliness only attainable by a special effort of the architects. On the outside, it was a heavy concrete block with windows and it looked like a jail; and on the inside, it had sixteen floors of long hallways decorated in mottled, dark green or gray paint, wooden benches, and inauspicious doors leading to offices, judge's chambers, and courtrooms, some well-maintained and magisterial, like courtrooms on TV, and others worn out, dark, and dilapidated._

_He hurried down Centre Street to the subway station on Chambers Street. A scruffy, bearded homeless guy wearing a threadbare green coat and baggy trousers was busking in the subway station, mangling guitar chords and singing Abba off key. The jangling, out of tune guitar echoed hollowly around the tunnel. It felt like it was driving nails into his head, and not just because the busker was an abysmal musician and could not sing a note. Lennie sighed. Jack's usual temper chafing his nerves, now the usual crap subway station buskers. Yeah, he must be tired and stressed out and irritable. It had been a long year, and the holidays always depressed him._

_He had to sit down on one of the benches in the train station to wait for the 1 train, and for the briefest moment, he did not see a subway train screeching and rattling to a halt beside the platform, but a car attempting to halt or turn and going into a full-blown skid. He saw flashing lights and heard sirens. He felt weak and lightheaded, and then reality and equanimity returned as quickly as they had left. There were the train's doors hissing open. Now that was bizarre. The persistent question of why something as innocuous as a lone busker, even a Godawful one with no sense whatsoever of rhythm, pitch, and taste, bothered him nagged him all the way from the Chambers Street stop to the stop on 116th. What was even stranger was that static buzzed in his head, blunting otherwise sharp emotions and disconnecting him from normal experiences like the train's rocking movement, the squealing and hissing of the brakes, and the conductor's thick Brooklyn accent announcing each stop. Lennie dealt with it like he had dealt with almost any other crisis in his life -- shove it down, suppress it, don't bother with it. The question bottlenecked his emotions; Lennie knew ignoring it was a lousy idea - one of those things you learn in AA -- but he didn't have any better ones at the moment. By the time the train jerked to a halt at the 116th Street station, the disconnected feeling had faded to nothing so he did not have to think about it._

_He arrived at the crime scene, a back alley off of 120th and Broadway, fifteen minutes and four blocks after he climbed out of the subway station. Discarded cigarettes, plastic bags, beer cans, and empty bottles lay alongside the walls of boarded-up buildings. Dubious characters walked up and down the street or sat on the stoops of dilapidated apartments, casting suspicious glares at the cops and bright yellow crime scene tape. This was not a neighborhood you'd walk alone at night in if you were sane or unarmed._

_"The neighborhood's really gone to hell," an old man was saying to Rey Curtis, fixing his gaze on some invisible point behind the young detective. Rey looked like he'd already decided the old man wasn't much of a witness and only half-listened to him, glancing around for an excuse to wriggle out of the useless conversation. "Back in '72, this was a good place to live. Now-"_

_"If you remember anything you might have seen," Rey said, "Here's my card." He handed the old man a card that he took out of the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled himself away from the fellow, walking up to Lennie._

_"Where's the stiff?" Lennie asked. It was close. He could smell the acrid stench of decay. When he began working homicides, twenty-six years ago, that smell made him sick to his stomach. Now he barely noticed it._

_Rey led him over to a pile of garbage some citizen had thrown down a stairwell. The body of a woman lay crumpled with the trash. Blood had soaked into everything. The body was covered in it, and so was the concrete and most of the garbage. Lots of blood. There was so much blood in the human body, seven or eight quarts, and when it was all outside of the body on the pavement, it sent shudders through even Lennie's spine. The blood looked weirdly dissociated from the body, as if a truck carrying a vat of tomato juice had crashed in the stairwell. It all came from the woman's head, gruesomely mashed up, as if someone had taken a heavy object and beat her repeatedly. You couldn't tell if she was white or Hispanic, pretty or homely, young or old. You could barely tell she had a head. It was so bloody and gory that Lennie, for all of his twenty-six years of death investigations, felt sickened._

"_Fuckin' brutal," he muttered._

_"She was an NYU student," Rey said, standing at his shoulder._

_"Since when are you the friendly NYPD psychic?" Lennie quipped._

_"She had ID on her," Rey growled. At crime scenes, he was the last person to ever make a joke, and he ignored most of Lennie's. He was all business. That was how Rey coped; he became so focused he wouldn't know a joke if one whacked him upside the head. "Her name was Gillian Chase."_

_"Any kind of weapon?"_

_Rey rolled his eyes. "Maybe a brick."_

_There were lots of bricks and rocks lying around._

_"Witnesses?"_

_"You kidding? On this block?"_

_It was the sort of city block where more than half its inhabitants were probably up to something illegal. _

_"All right, since you're all up to date here, tell me, was it a robbery?"_

_Grimacing, Rey shook his head and picked up a wallet that someone had put on the hood of a police car. He flipped through its contents: a couple of credit cards, twelve dollars in cash, an NYU student ID, and a Minnesota driver's license. "It's all we found on her."_

_"Probably thought Minnesota winters would kill her first," Lennie said, studying the driver's license. She looked like she had been a nice young girl, clean cut, pretty, and he didn't feel anything one way or the other about her, other than disgust at the brutality of the murder. This one was worse than most. Any sorrow he felt was only a vague stirring of emotion somewhere deep inside him, nothing tangible, nothing affecting his judgment. You could never empathize too much. As soon as you started breaking your own heart over them, it was time to find a new line of work. He turned to a CSU person, "Make sure they do a rape kit on this, okay?"_

_The crime scene secured, witnesses interviewed, and evidence collected, the detectives found nothing more they could do there, so they returned to their precinct._

_Lieutenant Anita Van Buren intercepted them in the hallway between the entrance and the squad room, falling into step with them. Van Buren had been promoted to this job four years ago, and she ruled over the tiny corner of the world that was the Twenty-Seventh precinct diligently, proving to skeptical male chauvinist superiors that a black woman was as competent a commanding officer as any male they dredged up. Van Buren succeeded in that she still had her job, but she occasionally bitched to Lennie, Rey, and other cops in the precinct that those sexist racist bastards hadn't promoted her to "captain" because they were sexist racist bastards. She was probably right. No amount of sleaze, pandering, or for that matter sexism and racism, coming from the NYPD surprised Lennie anymore. _

_"Jack McCoy left you a message, Lennie," Van Buren told him._

_"Was he kvetching about the witness prep session I ditched halfway through?"_

_"No, why?" Van Buren asked, creasing her brow._

_"'Cause I was in the middle of one when I got this call."_

_"Then I guess he survived you leaving just fine," drawled Van Buren caustically, imagining McCoy's predictable fit. No love lost between her and that prosecutor._

_Lennie picked up the phone at his desk and dialed the District Attorney's office and McCoy's extension. Like Van Buren said, Jack had survived and quickly gotten over his ire. He briefly mentioned that they'd have to reschedule the prep before Lennie testified, but otherwise he didn't seem at all concerned about it. That was Jack for you. He could throw a ridiculous fit about something and then appear to forget why he had ever been angry an hour later. He asked that Lennie meet with him in person about something else._

Olivet's cell phone rang. Lennie's heart skipped a beat.

_Stunned, he stared at the bright red blood flowing from the jagged laceration on his hand, streaming down his wrist and forearm, soaking into his sleeve. The phone was ringing..._

"It's nothing... They'll leave a message," Olivet said calmly.

Lennie sat stiffly in his chair, staring at the door, hardly breathing, his spine rigid, his brown eyes as wide as dinner plates.

"Lennie," Olivet repeated, laying her hand on his forearm. Her touch brought his mind back to reality. He relaxed his back, swallowing and blinking, trying to look as if everything was fine. Everything was fine, dammit. He met Olivet's soft, slightly smug gaze. Her look he recognized; he'd given many a murder suspect the same look. The damned psychiatrist knew something he didn't, or knew something he didn't think she knew. "Four weeks ago," said Olivet. "McCoy wanted to talk to you about something?"

_Lennie and Jack walked along Jack's favorite path in Columbus Park, a small green patch on the across Baxter Street from the DA's office, flanked by One Hogan Place and the Criminal Courts Building on the west and Chinatown on the east. It was one of the few nice days you ever saw in New York in December, the temperature pleasant and the sun shining. Lower Manhattanites had taken advantage of the gentle weather. The path was busy with lawyers on lunch break gossiping, people walking their dogs, inline skaters, bicyclists, young people arm in arm, old people lounging on the benches or ambling along the side of the path, children playing on the slides and swings in the park, teenagers bouncing tennis balls in the park's big tennis court. Even the homeless didn't look too miserable because it was balmy and bright. Jack had his heavy leather jacket slung over his left arm, and Lennie had his tan overcoat unbuttoned._

_The sun glared harshly off the pavement, and Lennie put on his dark, rimless sunglasses._

_"Nice sunglasses," Jack said._

_"They were three bucks," Lennie replied, grinning. "Good for picking up ladies."_

_Jack snorted. "I bet. Ones to your taste then? Old and blind." He shook his head ruefully and glanced at his watch. "We don't have much time. There's a parole board hearing for Gerald Isaac I gotta show up for at noon. He's probably gonna say he poses no threat to his wife's sister -"_

_Lennie remembered the wife's sister. "Then why let him out?"_

_Jack laughed and then turned serious. "Well, we have a problem, Detective."_

_"What's news?" Lennie shrugged. When didn't they have a problem?_

_"You know that corruption case in the Nineteenth Precinct?" Jack ran his hand through his salt and pepper hair, frowning._

_"What a fucking mess of a case. I thought you won it."_

_"So did I, but I think there may have been problems with the jury."_

_Lennie groaned. Jury problems. He hated jury-related technicalities almost more than he hated Fourth Amendment technicalities. Jury problems bit you in the ass when you thought your case was done and over with and you'd washed your hands of it. "What kind of jury problems?"_

_"Apparently jurors may have disclosed in a post-trial statement that they focused on an issue never raised during the trial."_

_Lennie rolled his eyes, pursed his lips, cynical and annoyed -- his usual range of expressions. Stirring up new and creative problems was what defense lawyers and prosecutors did when it suited them and you lived with it. Legal shenanigans, even the ludicrous and nonsensical ones, no longer surprised him, but some still flummoxed the hell out of him. Lawyers worked a magic that he could never quite grasp sometimes, a magic of creating bizarre technicalities and weird loopholes out of thin air, of spending hours arguing over what amounted to absolutely nothing, but somehow turning nothing into a migraine headache. Some lawyers, they could turn a case as solid as Fort Knox into Swiss cheese before you could say "motion to dismiss." It made you want to put your service revolver to somebody's head -- either your own or the attorney's._

_"Somebody's lawyer is earning his five hundred bucks an hour," Lennie observed, his tone acid, but calm and nonchalant nevertheless._

_Jack just shrugged and looked at Lennie, probably trying to decide if the old cop didn't think questionable jury statements were all that serious, or if he was just Briscoe the homicide detective, professionally serene in every crisis. "It sounds ridiculous to you. But I need you to investigate it anyway."_

_"Gee... I only have four homicides and your trial... I'll have no problem finding the time to investigate this."_

_"Cut the sarcasm, Detective. Just find a few minutes to check it out." Jack looked at him imploring, pure naked desperation, unleavened by spleen, anger, irritability, resentment, aggression, or other invigorating hotheaded emotions that people were accustomed to seeing in Jack McCoy. The district attorney did not believe in pleading or begging. His attitude was one of 'you don't want Man One? Fine. We're going to trial and aren't you ever fucked.'_

_McCoy's stressed-out, imploring gaze amused Lennie enough so that he agreed to investigate the jury statements._

_"You owe me one, Counselor," Lennie said with a wry grin. He would to milk Jack until he mooed._

Staring anxiously at his watch, Lennie stood up and paced around the room. This exhausted him, recounting every Goddamn detail he could possibly remember about what was going on in his life four weeks ago.

"I don't mean to be rude, Doc," he said to Olivet, stopping his irritable pacing to face her, crossing his arms over his chest, "But how long are we gonna be here for?"

"I don't mean to be rude either, Lennie," Liz replied crisply, "But we'll be here for as long as we need to be here for."

"Am I gonna be out of here by the end of my shift?"

"That's up to you."

More disingenuous answers. Lennie scowled. He had several cases needing work, preferably before the shit hit the fan. Poor Rey, he would be working them alone all today and maybe tomorrow at the rate this was going.

"Now, what was the case with the DA?"

Lennie bit his lip. "Why do we keep going to that?"

"What was it?"

He sighed. What would it take to shake Liz's unflappable demeanor? "Just another case we had."

_No sooner had Lennie returned to the precinct after his conversation with Jack than the two detectives were called to a death in Lincoln Square._

_The apartment was right over Lincoln Center off of West 66th, and Lennie and Rey had to cross the Center to get to it from where they'd parked their car on Columbus. The Center was crowded with people, most avidly listening to a jazz band playing dissonant Christmas carols in front of the Julliard School. The music disturbed Lennie, like the busker in the Chambers Street subway station four days ago had bothered him. He sped up his pace, walking as quickly as he could through the crowd, which suddenly had the malicious intent of trapping him in the middle of Lincoln Center._

_He panicked._

_Lennie had never really panicked over anything before, not like this, not even when his life was threatened in his course of duties as a police officer. His heart pounded. Adrenaline rushed through his system. He fought to breathe normally and not hyperventilate. More than anything, he wanted out, of the Center, of the crowd, of something. Of course, he knew it was ridiculous, this blind panic, but there it was, a frantic, trapped feeling, a pain in his chest, uncontrollable, irrational. Escape from Lincoln Center. That would relieve the grasping panic. God, if he could only get out. He didn't try to explain it now, didn't want to, he just wanted out. He felt Rey's baffled gaze at his back, but he didn't care. He had to get away from the music. A clump of people trickling out of the Met blocked his path, slowing him down. His heart thudded against his ribs. He wasn't in Lincoln Center anymore. He didn't hear a jazz band playing Christmas carols. He stood in the middle of a lonely intersection at night, and he heard sirens. All he heard was the wailing of sirens._

_"Lennie?"_

_He barely heard his partner. Rey's voice sounded distant, as if his partner shouted across a deep chasm._

_"Lennie!" Rey repeated more forcefully, grabbing Lennie's shoulder._

_Lennie sharply turned around, Rey's fingers digging into his shoulder bringing him back to reality. "What?"_

_He looked into Rey's severe, chiseled features, now etched with concern. "You okay?" Rey asked._

_Lennie shook his head and blew out a lungful of air. "I'm fine."_

_Rey looked doubtful and studied Lennie in the same way his ex-wives had studied him when they knew he was lying about an affair, but he didn't say anything else until they reached the building. Then he commented about how nice it would be to live in an apartment right over Lincoln Center, if you could afford it. On the Upper West Side, few people could afford anything these days._

_Lennie made no reply. His throat and mouth felt parched. He dug his hands into his waistband so he wouldn't rub his eyes and tried to convince himself that nothing was wrong. But he couldn't tune out everything. He felt like he was seeing the world through a reverse telescope -- everything outside of his mind was small and far away; it couldn't touch him or affect him. The telescope magnified his emotions, discordant and off-kilter. _

_They showed the apartment's doorman their gold detective's shields and then rode the elevator up to the 52nd floor. A large mirror hung over the back wall, and expensive red carpet with gilded edges covered the floor and the other two walls. Lennie looked at himself in the mirror. His complexion was pale and his brown eyes unusually dark and pupils dilated, although it wasn't so dark in the elevator. Sweat shone on his forehead, and he wiped it off with his sleeve._

_"They must have a different weather system up here," he cracked to Rey. Making lame caustic jokes, that was Lennie's way of coping with stressful situations. The joke bounced off of Rey like a rubber ball on a sidewalk, and Lennie wondered if Rey was just being his usual humorless self because they were on their way to a crime scene, or if Rey also noticed that Lennie looked terrible and didn't buy the joke._

_A uniformed officer met them near the elevator. She looked relieved to see them and directed them towards the room at the end of the hall. The carpet outside the elevator looked exactly like the carpet inside the elevator, red with gilded edges and spotless, as though dry-cleaned yesterday. There wasn't a trace of any mess anywhere until the detectives entered the deceased's room, marked by a bored cop and bright yellow crime scene tape across the door. The cop let them into the room, where the first-response officers and CSU were going about their business._

_Their business was a white male, more or less in his late fifties or early sixties, dressed in a high-calibre, probably Fifth Avenue, suit and tie. The vic had a gunshot wound from a .38 to his head. Blood had soaked into the carpet and spattered on the white walls like a Jackson Pollock painting._

_Some of the detached feeling faded, now that Lennie had work in front of him. He found that somewhat relieving, although the dissociated, scattered sensation sitting heavily in his chest and gut balled up into a headache behind his right temple._

_"Think this is a suicide?" Lennie asked caustically. "If I had to look at New Jersey all the time, I'd want to off myself too." The apartment had a view of the West Side Highway, the glittering Hudson River, and New Jersey. That part of Jersey, West New York and Union City, was a depressing sight, industrial, polluted, and run-down; the bad neighbor you pretend you don't know anything about and have nothing to do with._

_He and Rey went through the usual litany of questions to the CSU people, the officers initially on the scene, and the cleaning lady, who had discovered the body. When did you find him? Do you know him? Make sure ballistics checks the angle on that bullet. Who else was staying in this room? Has anybody found a weapon? The usual litany of answers was, for the most part, unhelpful. Rarely, during your initial exploration of a crime scene, do you discover any completely enlightening evidence._

_Someone found the man's wallet lying in a drawer and handed it to the detectives. They put on their latex gloves and flipped through it._

_The first thing Lennie pulled out was an American Bar Association membership card. "Hey, Rey, check this out. The guy was a lawyer. Nobody'll be cryin' over him."_

_Rey didn't respond to that, but he removed another card and said grimly, "This is gonna hurt. He was an ADA in King's County."_

_"In that case, there could only be like two million people who would want him dead. 'Take a number.'"_

_"Why does he own an expensive apartment in Manhattan?" Rey speculated._

_"What makes you think he owns it? Could be a girlfriend's or something."_

_"Or he's corrupt."_

_Lennie rolled his eyes two hundred seventy-degrees. Ever since a vicious police corruption case earlier this year, Rey saw any irregularities within law enforcement as immediately suspect. That case had come all too close to home. A cop, on the payroll of a drug dealer, murdered another dealer and then accused Lennie of stealing evidence back when Lennie and the corrupt detective both worked out of the One-Sixteen because he was pissed off that Lennie discovered the corruption and reported him to IAB and the DA. Had Rey believed in Lennie's innocence? Not as much as he damned well should have. "You know, you're turning into one of those conspiracy nuts," Lennie said flatly._

_Rey ignored that and observed, "I don't think the King's County DA's office is gonna be happy."_

_For a moment, they contemplated the crime scene in silence, Lennie feeling that sense of shock and uneasiness that often accompanies an investigation of a police officer's death vibrating through the vestiges that bizarre feeling he had suffered in Lincoln Center. A district attorney wasn't quite in the same ballpark, in his mind, as a cop, but it was close enough to jar his emotions._

_"Detectives!"_

_They snapped their eyes away from the wallet to a CSU tech that called out. CSU, finished with the body, was just bagging it. It lay on a gurney, halfway in a body bag of the same shade of yellow as the crime scene tape, prepared to go to the Medical Examiner's office. What had caught the CSU officer's attention was a gun lying underneath the body._

_Curious, the detectives examined the weapon; a .38 Smith and Wesson, recently fired, and basically unimpressive as far as guns go, like thousands of other .38 caliber pistols, Smith & Wessons, Colts, Barettas, whatever._

_After they had finished that crime scene, they returned to the car, walking back across the Center. Lennie didn't want to go back across the Center, but no way did he plan on asking Rey to bring the car around to Amsterdam, which would imply to Rey that something was wrong._

_Thankfully, the jazz band was taking a break, so no music played. With no music unpleasantly reminding Lennie of his panic attack an hour earlier, he shoved those his concerns to that locked space in his head he reserved for hiding things that would otherwise drive him mad. _

_Unfortunately his head throbbed, painful to the point of distraction. In the car, while he waited for Rey to climb in, he leaned against the steering wheel for a second, pressing his palm against his right eye and temple, wishing to God for some kind of major painkiller and an ice pack. It felt like the veins in his forehead pulsed, constricting, dilating, constricting._

_Rey, who hadn't stopped staring at him with that perplexed countenance, asked him for the second time, "Are you sure nothing's wrong?"_

_"I just got a hell of a headache. Got any aspirin in here?"_

_Rey dug around in the car's glove compartment and proffered two aspirin tablets. There was a bottle of water rolling around on the back seat, and Lennie gulped down the pills with the water. In fifteen minutes, he thought, the drugs should take effect, and he should feel better._

Olivet finished her coffee.

"Does that happen a lot?"

Lennie stared up at the ceiling. "Does what?"

"Do you get severe headaches often?"

"It's a stressful job. Who doesn't?"

She smiled that knowledgeable smile, cutting straight through him like a paring knife. "Do you?"

"Occasionally." He looked askance at her, but as usual she seemed unaffected. "That's why we keep painkillers in the car," he added.

_Three days later, Lennie and Rey spent the morning at the Medical Examiner's office, discussing a case that looked like a justifiable homicide, a rapist stabbed by his victim with a Swiss army knife during the act. The perp had died with his hard-on, and his vic was so lucky that she should go buy a lotto ticket, since she happened to strike the heart with her dinky little knife as opposed to striking anywhere else that would have pissed the attacker off and accomplished little else. The guy looked like the guy at the end of that movie Clerks, thought Lennie, with the sheet over him but his erection shooting forward, a distinctive lump in the sheet, poking into the air like a tent pole._

_"No thrill," the ME, Dr. Rogers, said._

_"I'll say," Lennie said._

_"That's a technical term. No ejaculatory thrill. He penetrated, but nothing happened."_

_No kidding, thought Lennie, except he died. He sighed, tired, and it was only ten o'clock. Did every strange case in the world have to happen this week?_

_"The knife in the heart killed him," said Rogers._

_"A fucking Swiss army knife. Who would think?"_

_"Right through the sternum. Punctured the aorta."_

_"That would do it," said Lennie._

_While driving uptown from the ME's office at Police Plaza to their precinct, the detectives took a short detour to the bar where Gillian Chase had worked as a barmaid As Lennie saw it, of all the unlikely things that might happen in the criminal justice system, solving that case was probably one of the most unlikely. There was no evidence. None. For all anyone knew, the girl beat her own head in. There were no indications that anyone else was around to do it (other than the physical impossibility of beating your own head in). There were no friends or acquaintances (yet) with nefarious motives or shaky alibis. There was no forensic evidence around the crime scene forming any probable cause, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt. There were no witnesses, since that neighborhood's inhabitants didn't see anything that wasn't their business. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The case was just one of those weird, fluky, inexplicable cases._

_Lennie saw that Rey felt unhappy about the case, a degree more disgusted about it than Lennie was -- maybe the thought of raising his daughters in this City where people were beaten up randomly in the streets bothered him. Since Lennie always found solace in a sort of 'it-could-be- worse' attitude, he related stories, of which he had an endless supply, of even flukier cases -- a story about a case where a kid had jumped from the roof of a twenty story building, intending to kill himself, and had been shot midair by an arguing couple in the ninth story; the story of a cult leader convicted of kidnapping and felony murder and how the next day, his entire cult committed mass suicide. And then there was the one about the woman who lopped off her husband's penis with a carving knife, and then did nothing but scream and cuss out her husband, the detectives, and New York City from the time the detectives entered her apartment to the time she was dragged into arraignment court. Meanwhile, her husband died of a cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. But Rey only looked more depressed at each story, so Lennie shut his mouth. Death and accidents and general mayhem were littering on the track of the criminal justice business. You learned to cope with it._

_The bar was near 100th and Broadway, in the basement of a dilapidated building. It was a dive, small and dark with deteriorating tables and benches, paint flaking off the walls, and two holes in the ceiling which dripped water steadily. The three or four customers looked like they had become part of the furniture ten years ago. It reeked of alcohol, mold, and urine. In his drinking days, Lennie wouldn't have minded the acrid smell, and if he did, he'd soon be too drunk to care. In his drinking days you could also smoke indoors and tobacco concealed the worst odors. But now it turned his stomach. _

_On entering the bar, Lennie went into the toilet for a pee. There was urine on the floor and instead of cleaning it, the management had merely put up a sign warning of a wet and slippery floor. Fantastic. It reeked worse than the rest of the bar._

_Rey had less tolerance for dodgy bars than Lennie did, and when Lennie emerged from the restroom, he noted that his partner looked about ready to either puke or voice his disapproval of excessive drinking. _

"_Don't go in there," warned Lennie, indicating the men's room. _

_The two cops walked up to the bar and flashed their badges at the bartender, catching his attention. He was a small, pale man with wispy hair and bloodshot, tired eyes._

_"Can I get you fellas a drink?" he asked, at first not connecting the dots between the badges and Lennie and Rey being detectives. The man looked jittery and somewhat dazed, like he had just done three lines of coke in the bathroom. _

_"No," Lennie said vehemently._

_Rey gave a softer, "No, thanks."_

_The bartender frowned, obviously annoyed, and moved in the direction of one of his regulars._

_Lennie held up his badge in front of the bartender's face. "NYPD," he said, enunciating and punching each letter. "We gotta few questions we need to ask you."_

_The bartender gave them a long-suffering look._

_"You know this girl?" Rey asked, showing him the picture of Gillian Chase they'd pulled off her driver's license. "She used to work here?"_

_After studying the picture for a few seconds, the bartender shrugged and said, "Yeah. So? Why are you guys here?"_

_"We're homicide cops," Lennie answered, irritated by the man's bored lack of cooperation. "This girl, she was homicided."_

_"Oh," said the bartender._

_"So, she worked here," prompted Rey. "She make any enemies? Piss off any customers?"_

_The bartender shrugged._

_A customer, a heavyset Irish-looking man with a shock of bright red hair and bloodshot blue eyes leaned over tipsily into Rey's shoulder. He looked like he could take Lennie and Rey on together, and he'd kick their asses, drunk or sober. But Rey didn't even flinch. Lennie remembered one time -- their second case together -- while surrounded by a gang of angry motorcycle gangsters, when Rey had the chutzpah to pull his service revolver on an enormous biker. That could have been ugly. That and you just don't pull your gun on people unless your life is threatened. The biker had tossed a racial epithet at Rey but offensive as it was, Lennie hadn't thought it life threatening; not until Rey had pulled his piece on the guy. Then it was life threatening. The situation had terrified Lennie. Rey, he never blinked, not even after Lennie had castigated him for being reckless and stupid. No, nothing frightened Rey Curtis, nothing short of losing his marriage anyway._

_"I remember that girl," the red-haired man slurred._

_"Do you remember the last time she was in here?" Rey asked, wrinkling his nose. Nervous he was not. He only seemed disgusted._

_The man thought about that for a long time through his alcoholic haze, and then finally said, "Five nights ago... Was she here five nights ago, barkeep?"_

_The barkeep also thought about that for a long time._

_"Wheels turning but the gerbil ain't running," Lennie muttered, his voice so low that only Rey, sitting on the stool beside him, heard him. _

_The barkeep dropped a drawer-full of crumpled paper on the bar in front of them and told them to feel free picking through it themselves. "Now you guys don't even hafta bother with a warrant. Take it with you," he said, smiling for the first time, a lecherous grin._

_"How often did Ms. Chase work here?" Rey asked the bartender after a pause._

_"Couple nights a week."_

_"You didn't notice that she hasn't been at work for five nights?" Rey continued._

_The bartender gave him a befuddled look that you had to be out of your head to wear with any kind of conviction and sneered, "Well, I ain't her fuckin' nursemaid. They stop workin'. I stop payin'. I find someone else. There's no shortage of young girls lookin' for work in this town."_

"_What kind of work?" Lennie asked. "Was this the only kind of work Gillian did?" He imagined more than pints being served at this place. There were also hundreds of bars in town which were less skeezy where a university student who needed a job could work, no problem. What skeletons did Gillian Chase have hidden in her Midwestern closet? Prostitution? Drugs? You fall into that underworld and you'll be dealing with people who would not think twice about smashing your head in with a brick. _

_A shadow of alarm flitted across the bartender's reddened face. "I wouldn't know anything about, officer. She just worked here." _

_Yeah, right, thought Lennie. But with nothing more than a gut feeling and no backup or evidence on which he could rest his suspicions, he let it go. For now. "Lets go, Rey." _

"_What a place," Rey said, his face contorted in repugnance. "You think she was up to something illegal?" _

"_What, like parking in handicapped spaces or jaywalking?" Lennie cracked._

_Rey rolled his eyes. "Lennie…"_

"_Well, probably. I mean, the only people in that bar are the alcoholics who have fried every brain cell they've got and anyone who wants a friendly place to get coked up or roll a spliff in the bathroom. I suspect she may have been in the latter category. The coke that is."_

"_Or the cannabis," insisted Rey, who thought any kind of illegal drug use violated his inflated sense of morality._

"_Nah," said Lennie. "Too damned violent. Potheads usually aren't that violent. Too stoned to put in the effort." Then to change the subject from the inevitable and tiring political row over whether or not pot should be legal, he added, "I have to go down to the DA's office. Drop off some stuff for McCoy."_

_"Okay," Rey said without enthusiasm, grumbling under his breath about another long drive downtown through chaotic, tangled traffic on Broadway to the damned Civic Center. "Lets go to the DA's."_

_Then, as they navigated the traffic morass of Columbus Circle, Rey said, "You think drugs are the only illegal thing going on in that bar?"_

"_Probably not."_

"_Organized crime?"_

"_Probably." Sometimes a skeazy bar was just a skeazy bar. Then there was that special kind of skeazy bar that was a money-laundering front for something more sinister. _

"_I'll check with my old pals at OCCB. See if they know anything about that place. What kind of organized crime, do you think, Len?"_

"_Fuck knows. IRA, some kind of drug lord thing, Triads, could be fuckin' anybody." _

_Traffic and kamikaze pedestrians allowing, they wove in and out of traffic jams and pounded the horn at anyone moving slower than they wanted to go, a New York tradition as old as synchronized traffic lights. Even if traffic is stuck because someone on a cross street is attempting to make a left-hand turn by blocking the intersection, you ride your horn and hope the continent moves under you. The fruits and nuts on the City Council had passed one intelligent law making it illegal to block intersections, but people still flagrantly violated the law, at least until they were caught and nailed with fines expensive enough to fix all the potholes in First Avenue._

_In Foley Square, a brass band blared out a wailing and altogether too cheery tune that would better fit a high school football grounds. What was with this? Somebody was attempting to give the DA's office and courthouses a festive atmosphere, and Lennie didn't think it worked worth a damn. The New York County District Attorney's office, Supreme Courthouse, Criminal Courts Building, and federal courthouse needed a festive atmosphere like a gunshot wound to the head, holidays or no. Lennie ground his teeth, holding himself together._

_It was lunchtime, so half the judges, lawyers, and clerks who worked in those buildings lounged around the square._

_It seared into his brain like the jazz band at Lincoln Center or the subway station busker had seared into his brain. My God, here it goes again, he thought, as reality -- Foley Square, the courthouses, the band, the other people in the square, Rey -- quavered uncertainly, images of that dark intersection just beyond it forming at the edges of his mind, threatening to close in on him. He forced them back._

_Damn music. It annoyed the hell out of him, and it stirred the anxiety around inside his stomach so he felt nauseous._

_Before he could leave, or even tell Rey what he had to give McCoy wasn't that important after all, Jack and Jamie, on a bench near the subway station, spotted the detectives and called out. Having not noticed them, Lennie startled badly. The prosecutors were eating subs and watching people climb in and out of the subway station. To hell with it, Lennie was here. He didn't feel like explaining why he didn't want to be here; he didn't know how to explain why he didn't want to be here, or why he wanted to be at home, where he could deal with the precise number of people he wanted to deal with, which was precisely zero. This state of mind he didn't recognize, since he'd always been more or less gregarious and more or less energetic and right now, he was neither. Everything was exhausting. His cases were exhausting. Rey was exhausting. Van Buren was exhausting. The prosecutors were exhausting. They must be, because he was exhausted._

_Tuning out the horns and trumpets as best he could, he jogged across the square and joined McCoy._

_Shouting over the noise, Lennie yelled in Jack's ear, "I checked out your jurors. They got two problems. One is that they discussed whether there was 'great bodily injury' or not, as opposed to whether the guy who was driving the car was the guy you said was driving the car. Two of them had discussed the case during the trial – what the fuck is with this? You can hear these damned sirens all over the City!"_

_Jack looked at him, puzzled. So did Jamie and Rey, creasing their brows, bewildered and concerned._

_"Brass band," he muttered. "Brass band. You can hear them... All over the City." Neither prosecutor said anything, but they eyed him as if he'd gone completely mad. Had he? Then Jack started loudly voicing his concerns about one of their cases, but Lennie could not focus on what he was saying. Jack's usual frantic quality that never had fazed him felt abrasive. The lawyer had no peace in him, day or night._

_"Is something wrong?" Rey whispered into Lennie's ear from behind him._

_"Nothing. I'm fine." When they used that voice of concern with you, your own voice had to be especially cool and ironic._

"Did you know, at this point, that your friends were concerned about you?" Liz asked as if she were asking for directions to The Museum of Modern Art.

"No, sorry. My psychic powers weren't working that day."

"Concerned about your behavior..."

"I know what you meant. I don't feel comfortable answering that," he replied. She wasn't the only one in the room who could act like a lawyer.

She raised her eyebrows. "Why were they concerned, Lennie?"

"I don't know."

"Are you saying to me that all these people you work with, cops and lawyers, are just blowing smoke out their asses then?" Even the way she cursed, borrowing his own rough, off-the-streets language, was serene.

He ran his uninjured right hand through his thick graying hair, exhaling sharply. "Christ on a bike. If you want to know what my friends were thinking and why they were thinking it, ask them."

"I did," she answered, unfazed.

"So I gathered."

"Why do you think they'd be concerned about you?"

"I can't answer that. I don't know."

"Did you talk with anyone about it?"

"Not... no."

"You sure? You didn't have a conversation with Detective Logan several days after that?"

"What are you, Doc? A DA wannabe? I feel like I'm being fucking cross-examined."

_As soon as the interminable I-278 traffic cleared and Lennie crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that took him over the river from Brooklyn to Staten Island, the landscape changed from the urban maze of tall imposing skyscrapers towering over the streets like canyon walls to suburbia: houses and shops and greening lawns. You never saw green lawns in Manhattan. Still, he thought Staten Island was a hole. The houses looked flimsy, the shops sporting fading neon signs and flaking paint from the 1980s, the lawns unkempt, the roads potted. There was nothing to do here in this backwater of New York City, the forgotten borough. You had to pay a toll to get out of Staten Island, not in. _

_Lennie turned into the One Twenty-Eighth precinct's parking lot and parked between two blue and white police cars, one a nondescript sedan and the other a boat of a station wagon. Wearily he climbed out of the car and leaned against it, rubbing his cheek absently. He felt that familiar sense of imminent catastrophe. It was like watching something fragile and expensive, like those garish vases Van Buren kept in her office, fall to the floor. You brushed passed it and continued on your way, only to turn around and see it tip, tip, until it was suspended in midair. That's where he was, suspended in midair, just before the inevitable fragmentation._

_Lennie walked into the precinct, noting that it wasn't anything like his own back in Morningside Heights. This one was sterile, clean and well lit, decorated with dove gray walls, new gray linoleum and big tinted windows with views of Manhattan across the harbor. Trying to make Staten Island look classier than it was. At least it had a modern police station. It looked more like a small office building. No police station should look as attractive as a suburban bank branch. Lennie decided he could never work in a place like this (nevermind that it was on Staten Island, to boot!), and he wondered how his old partner, Mike Logan, managed it._

_As Lennie contemplated the decor, or lack thereof, the precinct's desk sergeant asked him what he wanted. He showed the guy his badge, and the desk sergeant, no doubt thinking that a Manhattan homicide detective must have extremely important business if he was here, quickly let him into the squad room, not even asking him who he was meeting or why he was here._

_The squad room was as maddeningly clean and well lit as the rest of the place. Lennie breathed in the nauseating antiseptic smell of hospital corridors and cheap office buildings. He idled by the door for a moment, looking around, listening, uncomfortable with the precinct's Wall-Street-law-firm silence. In the Two-Seven, people always yelled at each other. It was a matter of course that if you had to say something to someone on the other side of the room, you didn't walk over there, you shouted across the room. Phones always rang. The fax machine constantly squealed. Everyone was always complaining and joking. Lennie's precinct had character. This place was so damn quiet and soulless, like Staten Island itself. _

_Mike Logan, still a hopeless slob, had a desk near a window with a view of Manhattan. He had papers scattered on his desk and the surrounding floor, and case files stacked dubiously in the corner. Mike's current partner wasn't an improvement; their stuff meshed where their desks touched. The partner wasn't there. Logan had cleared a space in front of him and flipped through some papers that looked like DD5s, a task as mundane as anything gets in the justice system, and Mike looked sufficiently bored, biting at his lip, rolling his eyes, fidgeting with other objects on the desk. No one could look bored as well as Mike Logan. He didn't see Lennie, although he must have heard someone behind him because he stopped working and said,_

_"Can I help you?"_

_"You still haven't learned how to organize, I see."_

_Logan turned around, wearing his typical smartass grin. "Lennie! I never thought you'd actually show up here!"_

_"Better late than never."_

_"And you were always a neat freak, right?"_

_"I don't use the floor as storage space."_

_"Only 'cause I wouldn't let you." Logan stood up and punched Lennie playfully in the shoulder, not so bad in its own way since it distracted Lennie from his inner turmoil._

_Lennie managed a smile and said, "When you called, I'd thought I'd come over and see if you hadn't broken down under all this. And to see how that case your precinct got from mine was coming along."_

_"Cases can't go anywhere when you're short in the evidence department."_

_"You know that statistic about how sixteen percent of any group of people are jerks? Sixteen percent of all evidence in a criminal case is useless as a bent nail."_

_"We've got damn near bupkes but we're working with it."_

_Lennie smiled slightly at the use of one of Don Cragen's expressions. Same old Logan. "I haven't seen you in six freakin' months," Mike continued. "How is everything across the harbor?"_

_"It's fine. New partner's finally starting to figure it out. Van Buren is Van Buren. You know how it goes."_

_"Yeah, I know. This place isn't so bad. Less hectic than downtown."_

"_Really? This island is a fucking hole." Lennie's eyes drifted to the window and the skyscrapers arching out of the river like the vertebrae of a giant sea monster. "At least you have a view."_

_Mike laughed. "Nah. Staten Island's not so bad. The quiet life does me good. Or else I'd look like you in ten years!"_

_Grinning, Lennie made as if to swat Mike's head for that. He studied his old partner carefully. When they'd worked together, Mike was pissed off at the world and had sported a hair trigger temper. Something had triggered it the day he punched that city councilman in the face. IAB had sent Logan to Staten Island to cool his temper and give him a chance to work on his interpersonal skills. Not that that schmuck Crossley hadn't deserved it, but there are more diplomatic and more importantly legal ways to tell someone to fuck off. Three and half years in Staten Island, though, seemed to have mellowed Mike out. Maybe the isolation of the backwater precinct had done him good, as he said. He seemed calmer, happier, and more likely to talk to a suspect than knock him out. Logan's demeanor had changed -- he was still brooding, but less so and somehow brighter. Maybe there was a steady girl in his life instead of a different one every week. Maybe he'd just finally figured it out, gotten his act together, worked out some of his issues. The old fire still burned in Logan's eyes, but there was no danger of implosion._

_They went outside -- the air was chilly and bright -- and they walked down the street a block to an Irish pub. Mike had always found the best way to connect with his Irish roots was to drink Guinness in Irish bars. Like its brethren across the river and everywhere else in the world, this pub's walls were covered in advertisements for Guinness, old rusty farm equipment, photographs of peatbogs and villages of white stone houses with thatched roofs, and road signs pointing to places with slightly unpronounceable names requiring a Transatlantic flight to actually get to, like Ballinasloe, Drogheda, and Glencolmcille. The mostly white clientele could be heard well above five musicians playing Irish jigs and reels in the background. The music drew Lennie's attention like a moth to its demise in a halogen lamp. There were two fiddles, a flute, a guitar, and a strange looking set of bagpipes that rested across the player's lap and had half the volume of the bagpipes you saw marching down the street on St. Patrick's Day but was still too damned loud. There were no PAs or anything like that, but it was still too loud. The players sat in a circle, staring at either the floor or each other, intensely thrashing out tunes, oblivious to the din of conversation and clinking of glasses around them. They pounded their feet against the floor, a relentless thumping which cut right through the pub noise. _

_It made him feel sick to his stomach and set his heart thudding annoyingly against his ribs. Mike asked him if he wanted a drink, but he shook his head. _

"_You sure?" Mike asked. Usually Lennie drank club sodas at bars. _

"_Nah, I'm all right," Lennie said, his voice sounding hollow. He could hear his pulse in his ears now, racing to keep time with the breakneck tempo of the tunes. Then one of the fiddle players raised her eyes from her fingerboard and the tune screeched to a halt. Several of them got up for the toilet or the bar. Lennie breathed out softly through his teeth. _

_Mike ordered a pint and nursed it for a few minutes while chatting with the barmaid, whom he obviously knew. For a second Lennie watched him, almost envious, in the way of all recovering alcoholics, of the carefree way the younger cop could drink booze. If only he could drink, he would deal with whatever problems he was suffering now by getting completely blind falling over drunk. That was why, of course, he couldn't touch the stuff now. He'd dealt with every problem, including merely existing, by getting blind drunk. But he missed it. Sometimes it made things much easier. _

_They went to a pool table at the back of the bar and removed two cues from the wall rack. Thankfully, the table was around a corner from the musicians and the walls and the din of voices in the bar drowned out the tunes. _

_Lennie sensed another headache brewing behind his temples and grabbed a cue before he could rub his head. Right, shooting pool would take his mind off his troubles. On his good days, Mike had no hope of becoming a decent billiards player. Lennie could sink a ball on every shot. Playing an actual game would be a useless, uncontested venture, so they just took turns shooting the balls. _

_Finally, Mike took a drink from his Guinness and got to the point. "Your partner, Rey Curtis, told Don Cragen about the wreck and Claire. Donnie told me, Len. I'm sorry."_

_"Ah, well," Lennie said dismissively, sinking the seven ball into a corner pocket._

_"Have you talked to anyone about it?"_

_"For Christ's sake, it happened over a year and a half ago. You're asking me about it now?"_

_"I... I heard some people are worried about you. Van Buren, Curtis, even McCoy... You wanna talk about it?" Lennie could hear Mike fumbling, attempting to bring up the real reason for his invitation._

_"What's there to say? I fell off the wagon 'cause I couldn't deal with the crap I went through that day. Kincaid's dead. McCoy was flipped out about that for a few weeks, but he seemed to get more or less over it. That's all."_

_"Only a few weeks? I thought they had a thing."_

_"Oh, they did. Maybe it still bothers him. He doesn't tell me squat."_

_Lennie still wondered how that one ever worked out because both Jack and Claire had been extreme -- he was an extreme son of a bitch and she was an extreme sweetheart. They had tried to keep their fling guarded -– in a worst-kept-secret-in-the-office sort of way. During the last few weeks before the accident, Lennie had felt dead certain they were sleeping together because they had both started to act like normal prosecutors -- he stopped treating every defendant in his caseload like Charlie Manson, and she prosecuted the more nefarious ones with some zeal -- something that neither of them had ever done before. That and anyone with any powers of observation can just tell these things about people by watching them. _

_"You need to talk to someone." Mike stabbed at the cue ball, and it bounced into a group of four balls, scattering them every which way, except for in the direction of a pocket. He smiled sheepishly and whispered, "I meant to do that."_

_"What? Like a professional?"_

_"Maybe. Or maybe a friend."_

_"What's there to say?" Lennie put two of those four balls into pockets._

_"How do you feel, Len?"_

_"You expect me to answer that right now?"_

_Mike leaned on his cue, looked at him soberly and said, "Yes."_

_"Yeah, right." He pretended to focus intensely on what was an easy shot._

_"Why not?"_

_"I don't wanna talk about it. What's past is past."_

_"You don't look good, Lennie."_

_"I never look good. I always look annoyed and cynical because I always am. My sunny disposition has been ruined by two divorces and too much boozing, I am a New York City homicide cop, and my back kills me so much that I'm at the mercy of my chiropractor."_

_"But normally you just look irritable. Now you look..." Mike paused, pinching at his lip, searching for the right word._

_"How do I look?"_

_"Hopeless. You look hopeless."_

_"Maybe I should cover the gray, then." Putting on his quirky sarcastic grin, Lennie ran his hand through his hair._

_"Tell me what happened."_

_"I don't remember it very well. I was off my face at the time." That was half-true. Lennie didn't remember it very well, but he hadn't thought he was that drunk. Hell, he'd been sober enough to shoot pool and win. If you were that far gone, you weren't coordinated enough to hit brick wall at three feet, much less aim a poll ball into a pocket. But his memory still wasn't all there. Okay, he hadn't made all of his shots that night. Sober, he never missed. The cracking sound of the cue ball against the nine and fourteen balls punctuated his sentence._

_Mike eyed Lennie skeptically. "You seem to be remembering it okay. Well enough to be bothered by it."_

_"Who says I'm bothered? I told you. I don't want to talk about it. It's all over now."_

_Logan saw through the half-assed excuse and stared hard at Lennie. "It doesn't sound that way to me, Len. Cragen said you've been acting funny for the past couple weeks-"_

_"That's why you called me-"_

_"Not entirely-" Logan tried to defuse his ex-partner's growing annoyance._

_"-You probably talked about it to Rey and Van Buren too, and now my life is a topic for general discussion among the entire fucking NYPD. Fantastic." Now Lennie was beginning to get irritated. "Does Rey think I need to see someone?"_

_"Rey thinks you need to go to church, frankly, and talk to a priest-"_

_Well, he would. Lennie interjected a dismissive snort but Logan didn't stop._

_"Van Buren wants you to talk to one of the NYPD's shrinks."_

_"That's cute," he said laconically, rubbing his face with the back of his hand and resting his weight wearily on his cue, watching Mike bounce the cue ball aimlessly off the side of the pool table._

_Mike stepped in and invaded Lennie's personal space, attempting to bully his old friend into leveling with him. "Do I have to lock you in an interrogation room and Mirandize you to make you talk?"_

_"I'll take the Fifth first. There's nothing I need to talk about."_

_Mike rolled his eyes as if to say "yeah, right," but he kept his mouth shut. At least he seemed to have the sense to know that he couldn't break Lennie any better than he could break a triangle of balls on the green felt nearby. He sighed raggedly and gave up._

_The eight ball was the last ball left on the table. Lennie played a bank shot and neatly sunk it in a side pocket._

"So were your friends concerned about you?"

Lennie sighed. Olivet was wearing him down. "They may have been," he conceded grudgingly. Talking about it, to Liz, to Mike, to anyone gave it life and power.

"Okay. How did you cut your hand?"

The unpleasantly familiar blank, fuzzy space in his memory. How many times had he woken up from an epic bender with inexplicable injuries? How many times had he woken up in his apartment, a subway station, a ditch, the back of a friend's van, his parking garage, and even a bench in Central Park without the faintest idea of how he got there? If he hadn't known that he had not been drinking, he would think he had gotten incredibly drunk and done something stupid. Pressing his fingers against his temples, he dredged up something that seemed to make sense, the same thing he remembered telling Van Buren and Rey when they asked him the same question yesterday, the day after he'd injured himself.

_After he returned from the concert, he parked his car in the garage two blocks down West 78th from his apartment. How he made it from Midtown to the West Side without crashing into the side of a building, he could not say, for he felt dizzy, his chest hurt, his hands shook, and his awareness felt dimmed. He climbed out of the car and leaned against it. His mind was so shot to hell that he forgot what he was doing, and he absently slammed the door. Bang, on his left hand. The pain startled him. He looked at the back of his hand. Blood flowed down to his wrist, soaking onto the white sleeve. It hurt like hell, and for a second, he thought he was going to be sick. Gritting his teeth, he took a few deep breaths, steadying himself. Go inside, find ice._

"You slammed a car door on it?" Olivet asked dubiously.

"Yes," he insisted. "It ain't hard to do."

He didn't like the look she was giving him. Thousands of times in an interrogation room at the precinct, he had given a suspect or a witness the same look. Why was she looking at him like that?

"Really?" said Liz, her voice calmly querulous.

_His phone rang, one, two, three rings._

_All he could do was stare at the phone, immobilized and trembling. _

Lennie swallowed, taking a few deep breaths. "Yeah," he answered. Perfectly calm. Never mind that what came out of his mouth didn't match up with what was in his head. What was in his head, he couldn't make sense of anyway. He slammed his hand in a car door, a common enough injury. People slammed their hands in car doors. Once Rey Curtis arrived at the precinct with bandages around his hand because he'd slammed it in a car door. "You want a signed affidavit?" he sneered, for good measure.

Olivet sighed, no doubt finding Lennie stubborn and frustrating, but she gathered her patience and said, "Now, go on. The King's County DA. What were you doing with that case?"

"We were investigating it."

"What were you investigating?"

He rolled his eyes. "It was a death investigation like any other."

Liz looked down at the file she had on the table in front of her, an action that unnerved Lennie. How much did she know? What did that file say?

"What exactly were you doing with that investigation?"

_"I have the file on our dead DA," Van Buren said to Lennie and Rey. They were in her office for the usual briefing, running through the cases they had that week, drinking lousy bitter instant coffee from the precinct's overworked coffee machine. That will be the day, Lennie thought, when the guys in Albany give us enough money to make coffee that doesn't make you gag and wish you were dead. Prisoners got better coffee than cops._

_Lennie took the file and went to his desk to read over it and see what he could learn about the dead King's County ADA, Nicholas Ferrin. He knew that the King's County DA's office was gnashing at the bit, with good reason, but the wheels of justice grind slowly, and every time you rushed a case, you ended up wishing you hadn't. So the New York County DA made an honest effort at ignoring the King's County DA, Van Buren made an honest effort at ignoring the New York County DA, and Lennie made an honest effort at ignoring Van Buren. That way, justice could take her sweet time._

_Speed reading through the file, Lennie learned that Ferrin had a high conviction rate, that he prosecuted narcotics cases, that all the people who worked with him had nothing but blubbering praise about him. He had the same birthday as Lennie - January 2nd, 1940. That tidbit of information amused him. At that instant, Rey stormed up to his desk, his austere features angrier than usual, looking like strangling someone with his bare hands wouldn't be above and beyond him at the moment._

_"Rey," Lennie said, grinning, "This guy has the same birthday as I do."_

_"That's nice," Rey said, too preoccupied to care. "The Buscemi case is going to hell."_

_The Buscemi case was a rape-attempted murder case they were working. The defendant had been indicted for aggravated sex abuse in the first degree and rape in the first degree, two B felonies, and so far, the case seemed in good shape. Jack McCoy hadn't complained about it, a hopeful sign since no news was usually good news once a case was bound over from Criminal Court arraignment._

_Did everything have to become a trainwreck this week? Lennie sipped at the coffee that had gone cold on the desk. "Now what?" _

_"You know the ER doc that did the rape kit?" said Rey._

"_Yep."_

"_He said-- to the grand jury, no less - he saw semen in pictures. We had our lab test for acid phosphatase and P30. There was none."_

_"How's the other evidence holding up?"_

_"It sucks. A lot."_

"_Does it suck enough that the case is fucked?"_

"_Pretty much." Rey looked down at the file he was holding. "The alleged semen was our best evidence proving that this was the guy who did it. Like the doc said he saw semen and everyone figured, well, if the doctor says it's there, then it's there. Now he may not have raped her, in which case he might not have attempted to murder her, either."_

"_Fucking great." Lennie massaged his eyes and pursed his lips, making himself a mental note to give the original investigating officers a shellacking about proper procedure for sex crimes investigations. Expert witnesses were not God (no matter how much some of them thought they were). They got stuff wrong. You had to do the tests. And for fuck's sake, you don't "see" semen eight or nine hours after the alleged intercourse. Investigating and prosecuting cases was onerous enough when you didn't have to clean up other people's mistakes. "Are you still sure it's the guy?"_

"_Oh, it's the guy. But you gotta prove that to a judge, don't you?"_

_"Obviously. Did anyone think it was a good idea to do the damned tests before the case went to grand jury?" _

_"Guess not," Rey said. "What's with these incompetent expert witnesses, man?"_

"_Dunno. He was an ER doc. Guess he didn't know what the fuck to do with the rape kit." _

"What did you learn about the DA?" Liz asked, studying her file briefly and then looking up at Lennie again, her expression interested.

He didn't think she was all that interested. It was her job to look interested in whatever he said.

"I didn't finish the file."

"Why not?"

"I didn't need to. After Rey told me about this mess with the rape kit, he said that the guy offed himself..."

_"Lennie," Rey said, after a momentary pause, his voice becoming even graver. "I got the ballistics and forensics report on the King's County DA." He shook his head sadly. "No one else was in that apartment between the hours of one and two am, the gunshot was point blank, and there was GSR on his hands."_

_"Damn," Lennie sighed. Suicide. That bothered him, another odd thing bothering him to go along with all the other odd things bothering him that normally didn't. A suicide. He should not feel so depressed by that. That meant he did not have to go through the hassle of investigating the murder of an officer of the court, the sort of migraine-inducing high-profile case he did not feel he could cope with right now. He should be relieved. But he just found it depressing._

_"I talked to some of his coworkers. They said he was perfectly fine. Why would a perfectly fine man kill himself?" Rey was looking off into space somewhere behind Lennie's right shoulder, speaking more to himself than to his partner._

_"He'd kill himself if he wasn't perfectly fine," Lennie replied, putting that case file away and pulling out another one. He wasn't surprised that the DA's coworkers thought he was perfectly fine. You go to work, act somewhat normal, and no one ever suspects a damn thing, not until you stick a gun in your mouth. Then they all wonder how the hell they could have missed the obvious signs that you weren't perfectly fine. It was amazing, just amazing, how blind, deaf, and dumb people could be, until it was too late. Too damn late._

"Manner of death was suicide," Lennie told Liz, shrugging. "We didn't need to look at it anymore."

"How did you feel when Rey told you it was a suicide?" Liz insisted.

"What?"

"How did you feel about that DA killing himself?"

"Nothing. Meant it wasn't our problem."

She smiled, like she didn't believe him. He knew how to lie convincingly, he knew how to look a murder suspect in the eye and tell him with a straight face that he had a gun with a ten-point match fingerprint on it, when no such evidence actually existed. Yet the damned shrink seemed to see straight through this lie. And what did his feelings about some suicidal Brooklyn ADA have to do with anything?

"I think it meant more to you than that, Lennie."

"A psych degree or two makes you a mind-reader?" he said flippantly.

Her expression unreadable, she scrutinized him for a minute, and then she flipped to a new page in her file, backing off from that line of questions. She was tapdancing around something; he knew it. When would she make him answer something he did not wish to answer? That's what shrinks, lawyers, and AA sponsors did, they compelled you to admit to stuff you weren't proud of or wanted to avoid any and all discussion about.

"Tell me, what was going on four days ago? You had a meeting at the DA's office?"

"It's not uncommon for me to have meetings at the DA's office, considering I have to work with those people. Yeah... if you say I did, I probably did."

"You did."

"Okay, so I did." He waited, annoyed with her psychiatrist's riddles.

Frowning, she studied him for a moment and said, "Just tell me what went on that day, okay?"

_It was fucking cold. Even though the sun was out, there was no warmth, and the forty-degree breeze whipping off the Atlantic felt like a freezing torrent. That was New York weather for you -- ninety-four degrees and ninety percent humidity in the summer, bitter cold in the winter, and not much in between. Lennie had grown up here, worked here, lived here, and he still felt as though he hadn't adjusted to the weather fifty-eight years later._

_The worst place to be was out on Pier 67, where the wind whipped off the cold Hudson River. But that was where Lennie and Rey had breakfast that morning while they waited for a witness to show up and talk with them about a homicide. They had their backs turned to the wind, not that it helped any, since the wind was a dagger, piercing whatever clothing you wore. Retirement in Hawaii or California became an inviting prospect, although Lennie hated California, and Hawaii was probably a lot like California, and he couldn't afford either place anyway. Last time he'd visited California had been for a nutty case earlier this year, the murder of a rich movie producer, a hotshot Hollywood player, and after that, he'd resolved never to go back there again. The perpetually nice weather turned your brain into something of the consistency of mashed potatoes. Of course, the New York City winters just froze it, and sitting here, eating a cold breakfast, freezing your butt off, attempting to convince yourself why you were better off here than in California, wasn't convincing at all._

_Someone once told him that food warms you up, but Lennie felt no warmer, and all the blood was going to his gut, so he was probably getting colder, if anything. The food wasn't all that appetizing anyway. Lennie usually enjoyed food, even when cold, but at the moment, he only ate because he had to, not because he was particularly hungry. His stomach didn't feel up to dealing with anything he'd put on it._

_Rey, ever the health-food nut, ate only a banana and some fruit, while Lennie, who had never in his life looked at health food with anything but disgust, picked disinterestedly at a sausage roll. Maybe there was something to Rey's dietary habits, Lennie thought. Rey was strong, athletic, and able to run down almost any perp. Or maybe there was just something to being thirty years younger. Twenty-five years ago, what had Lennie been doing? Starting on his alcoholic trajectory, that's what. Walking a beat in Hell's Kitchen. Fighting with his wife, Gloria. Alienating his daughters. Had he been athletic enough back then to outrun most perps? He didn't remember. He'd been no Rey Curtis, Mr. Perfect Cop, Perfect Family, fucking Norman Rockwell painting, that he remembered. Grimacing, he hunched his shoulders, shivering. Damn wind. Damn witness. Where the hell was she?_

_"Lennie," Rey glanced up from _The New York Post_, his dark brown eyes sparkling in wry amusement. "This headbanger in prison, C- Square, who writes God awful lyrics about screwing his mother and so forth- "_

_"Yeah, I know who he is," Lennie interjected with his characteristic quirky, smug grin. "He got done for rape four years ago. Logan and I did some work on the case."_

_"I know. Anyway, his mother's suing him for defamation of character. Claims that in a media interview, he portrayed her as stoned white trash."_

_That was what passed for news in those crap free papers like the _The New York Post. _Was there still a war on in Albania? Who knew? Lennie snorted, smiling a rueful smile that took ten years off his face. Even if the paper was making it up (Lennie would not put it past them), that guy deserved whatever he had coming, even if his mother really was stoned white trash. "Oh, really," he laughed. "Though she doesn't dispute that the sex was fantastic."_

_Rey guffawed in a rare moment of finding one of Lennie's jokes funny. Then he looked at his watch. "Our witness said she'd be here at eight, didn't she?"_

_"Yep."_

_"It's eight ten."_

_"So? Chill the fuck out. Not everyone's as anally punctual as you." Lennie wasn't in the mood to handle Rey freaking out about the world's refusal to operate on his timetable. "So, how's it going with Deb?" he asked, trying to make conversation and distract Rey from worrying about the time and himself from his slow death of hypothermia._

_Not a good topic. Rey didn't like discussing his marriage. Rey had had an affair and he'd been dumb enough to tell his wife about it, though inevitably wives figured it out whether you told them or not. Lennie had always wished he had the same nose for criminals that women had for unfaithful husbands. The young detective's marriage had gone to hell in a hand basket -- the usual business of on-again-off-again separations that Lennie knew well and knew didn't work well, the sort of mess that would make anyone unhappy, but Rey, who always had extramarital affairs right next to cold-blooded murder on his list of unforgivable sins, was devastated by his own infidelity. It wasn't as if Rey had made a habit of it. It was a one time thing -- Rey's reaction to the same execution that had sent Lennie and Jack McCoy into that bar that night. But Rey really hated discussing the affair and the subsequent marital problems with Lennie, since Lennie had enough cynicism about marriage to fill Long Island Sound, a laid-back attitude towards sleeping around, and he wasn't the epitome of fidelity. It had taken some effort on his part to even coax Rey into admitting there was a problem._

_"It's the same," Rey said, staring at his banana with such intensity that you might think the banana had screwed up his perfectly fine marriage._

_"Well, if you need to talk to someone..."_

_"You're the expert, right?" Rey's gaze flickered towards Lennie for a moment. His sharp features could have chiseled through a brick building._

_"Hey, I know what doesn't work," Lennie snapped, pissed off by Rey's sudden hostility, even though he knew damned well Rey hated this topic of conversation. _

_"If she doesn't show up..."_

_"Lets wait for fifteen more minutes."_

_Rey rolled his eyes and twisted his wedding ring. He twisted that thing for fifteen minutes, around and around on his finger, until Lennie almost demanded that Rey fidget with something else. Like a stopwatch, exactly fifteen minutes after Lennie suggested they give the witness fifteen minutes, Rey stopped twisting his ring._

_Rey observed caustically, "Okay, it's been fifteen minutes."_

_Lennie shot Rey a fierce "so, what?" look, cocking an annoyed eyebrow at him._

_"Don't we have other shit to do?" Rey snapped, flinching._

_Lennie supposed they did. His partner was driving him crazy today. Not that Rey was behaving out of the ordinary or anything -- if Rey didn't act like a self-righteous son of a bitch, Lennie would worry -- but Rey being Rey grated on his nerves badly today. He stalked towards the car._

_To hell with Rey. To hell with the witness._

_When Lennie looked over his shoulder, he saw a flummoxed expression replacing the irritated one on his partner's face. That he ignored._

_At the car, a sleek blue Ford Taurus, Rey let out an exasperated "What?"_

_"Nothing."_

_Rey gave kinder looks to murder suspects. _

_Wordlessly, they climbed into the car and drove down to the District Attorney's office to discuss a search warrant with Jamie Ross and McCoy, if Jack wasn't off at his trial. Lennie thought hell would freeze over if they got the warrant. It was a floridly problematic case -- the defense lawyer had convinced some idiot judge to sign off on an injunction against further investigation of his client. Rey thought they'd get the warrant, if they asked the right judge nicely and showed how their probable cause neatly sidestepped the injunction. But Ross had been to law school. She may not know - Lennie had learned a long time ago that lawyers sometimes didn't know the law any better than he did -- but if she said no, Lennie at least would win a bet against some other guys in the precinct._

_When they marched into Jamie's office, they found her in the midst of a heated phone conversation, sounding like she was trying ameliorate damage McCoy had caused._

_"No, I'm sorry. He didn't know... He's not. You can't do that. Underpaid. Aren't we all? I-" She looked up at Lennie and Rey, frowned, and demanded, "What do you want? No, not you. A couple of cops. Hang on a minute."_

_"Warrant for the Silvara case?" Lennie said._

_"Yeah... Get your warrant from Judge Rivera. It'll be fine." Jamie waived a dismissive hand, wanting them out of her hair._

_"It's not fine," Lennie argued. "You'd think if it were perfectly fine, we'd bother coming in here to talk to you about it?"_

_"Why is it not fine?" Now she just sounded pissed off._

_"Uh, Silvara. Remember. The case where Judge Kaelan enjoined McCoy..."_

_"Lennie, I'll read over the injunction and your affidavit tonight and get back to you tomorrow."_

_"If half the evidence doesn't walk out of his apartment tonight..." growled Lennie._

_"I'm doing the best I can." _

_He got the message. "Well, I hope McCoy doesn't throw too big a fit if the case goes straight to hell."_

_Jamie's attention had returned to her phone conversation. "He's handling it... He's handling it like he handles anything... I don't - well, he doesn't mince words… I'll get back to you." She hung up the phone and glared at it. "Why does my boss have to be such a fucking asshole sometimes. I swear he's gonna get himself disbarred," she complained to no one in particular. "He can do his own Goddammned damage control next time." _

_Lennie scoffed, "Apparently McCoy put his foot in his mouth again. Are you just trying to save the case, or is that not the only thing he's putting in his mouth?"_

_The prosecutor gasped and opened and closed her mouth like a fish caught on a hook, her blue eyes wide and indignant. She finally sputtered, "Lennie!" sounding like both his ex-wives, and added, her voice jumping up an octave, "I am not-" Halfway through that indignant sentence, she regained her composure and announced, "Adam wants to meet about the gang rape thing tomorrow afternoon." She placed her hands on her hips, as only women can when they're frothing mad, although Lennie couldn't say whether she was angrier about McCoy being McCoy, Adam Schiff's paranoid oversight of the gang rape case, or his caustic jokes._

_"Yeah, fine," Rey said, probably thinking it prudent to go before Lennie and Jamie had a full-blown row. The tension in the room was palpable. _

_As they left, Jamie called out, "Detective Briscoe! Come here for a minute, would you?"_

_He turned around and walked back into her office. Rey waited in the hall. "What, Counselor?"_

_She was still standing behind her desk, one hand on the affidavit he had left her, but the anger had gone from her eyes. Now she was eyeing him with a worried, slightly perplexed expression as if he'd grown a third eye._

"_You feeling okay?" she asked him. _

_Jesus, did everyone he knew have to ask him that? "Uh, yeah, fine."_

"_You sure?" _

_He shrugged. "I just hate the fuckin' holidays. I'll be fine after the New Year."_

"_Okay. Well, if you have anything you want to talk about…."_

"_I'll go to my fuckin' Rabbi," he joked, thinking of Rey telling him he'd be better off in life talking to the clergy of some sort of organized religion. Any one would do. _

"_I didn't know you went to Temple."_

_He smiled dryly. "I don't." _

_Like most people, she did not quite understand his sense of humor sometimes. Then again, he couldn't always say why he said the things he said, either. _

"_Right, well, you know where to find me. Take care of yourself, okay?"_

"_Yeah, thanks, Counselor." _

"What happened at the meeting with Adam Schiff?" Olivet inquired, her face genuinely curious, although Lennie knew she had the answers -- they were in her damned folder on the table.

"It was about the gang rape," he said. "You know, the Asian gang who dragged that woman into a minivan, raped her for like two hours and then she jumped off the Queensboro Bridge"

"What was the meeting for?"

"Just to straighten things out. Like usual."

_Ever since the vic's body had been discovered in the East River, the District Attorney, terrified of anyone screwing it up, had been calling weekly meetings about it. It had more potential than Monica Lewinsky to become a horrendous public relations disaster for the NYPD and Manhattan DA. Rape, suicide, racism, immigration, you name it. The media had jumped all over it. So the cops would meet with the prosecutors, and they would spend about an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less, bitching to each other about the case. Each meeting found Lennie deliberating whether he was baffled, pissed off, or both, because Adam Schiff's insufferable admonitions and ill-temper (the man was cantankerous on general principle) hadn't salvaged the case, an exercise in Murphy's Law, not the law of New York state, and Lennie had better things to do than vegetate on his butt in the DA's office, listening to pedantic lectures about the Constitution. As far as this case was concerned, whatever could go wrong did go wrong, whether you screwed it up or not. Lennie and Rey, who didn't have Schiff's hypersensitive political antennae but were astute enough to know when they could not, under any circumstances, fuck up, had been exceedingly careful, but fate and the adversarial system being what they were, the case fucked up anyway without their help. One defendant had killed himself-_

_"You didn't have him on suicide watch?" Rey had demanded of the Rikers Island prison guard._

_"Well, we didn't know he was suicidal," the guard had replied sheepishly._

_"Evidently not."_

_Two more defendants were bright enough and had bright enough lawyers to slip out of the law's grasp like wet salmon. The defense lawyers had convinced "Judge Meathead," as Jack derisively called him, though his real name was Marks, to suppress every decent piece of incriminating evidence. In the meantime, the right wing press expressed outrage over things like the perps being given their Miranda rights. Because, yeah, there's nothing like making sure your case can actually go to trial. What Lennie thought they needed was some good luck (in this they had been seriously lacking), a monumental mistake by the defense, or both, so the defendants would be caught with no room to wriggle. Jack just believed if he threw big enough a fit, enough admissible evidence would pop up to sustain an indictment and salvage some other evidence lost a few weeks ago to an omnibus suppression motion through inevitable discovery. Jack had a theory about the justice system, namely, if you didn't take the bit in your teeth and run headfirst into every legal or ethical barrier every court, legislature, or bar association ever put up, you would never get anything done. When he went off the deep end with a case, he was a freight train on a steep hill with no brakes. Adam Schiff's loose cannon, the press once called him, and they had no idea._

_Prosecuting this gang rape case, Jack was like a freight train ramming into a wall, with similarly disastrous results. _

_Jack had plead out the last two defendants, dispositions of varying counts of second degree kidnapping, second degree aggravated sexual abuse -- both to be served consecutively -- and third degree conspiracy, to be served concurrently with the other two charges, which added up to more or less forty years. They were class B, C, and D felonies respectively, blemishes on anyone's record, but the deal was an improvement over all the top counts of the indictment, A-I and B felonies adding up to something several years over life if the defendants served them consecutively. For all his willingness to battle the system and convince a judge and jury that raping someone so they kill themselves constitutes murder (even though New York State law says it probably doesn't, especially when the vic had a history of mental health issues which included an earlier suicide attempt), Jack did not get in his second-degree murder, or even manslaughter charges, which made him unhappy. Unfortunately he had to take what he could get. The perps deserved to be thrown off a bridge themselves but forty some odd years in prison would have to do. _

_When Lennie and Rey joined the meeting a few minutes late -- blame the traffic --McCoy was on his feet, pacing back and forth between Van Buren and Ross, facing Adam Schiff, speaking in his fiery, passionate closing argument tone._

_"_Strickland v. Washington_!" he spat, disgusted. "They're saying that they were denied effective counsel, can you believe that?" He paused dramatically as if he expected an answer, but everyone in the office knew him well enough to know he didn't want one. "If those bastards think they can wriggle out of their deals -- generous as hell, I might add, since if they dispo'ed at all the top counts of the indictment, they'd be serving fucking life sentences -- using Strickland, they're up shit's creek. They can't possibly prove that there was a reasonable probability that if it hadn't been for counsel's "errors," the case would have come out differently. The proper standard is reasonably effective assistance. Sally Bell and Tim Gonzalez, they've been in Legal-Aid forever and they're as effective as you could want." He stopped, caught his breath and added as a flourish, "Well, if they want a trial, fine. I'd be delighted to throw those fuckers in prison for the rest of their miserable lives."_

_Schiff said in a rather indifferent tone, "So let them argue it out in front of a judge." The old District Attorney regarded Jack. They all regarded Jack. Schiff looked as though he thought this was all too complicated for a man whose heart wasn't really in his work anymore, now that he had taken up golf as a sideline avocation with a sixteen tee average at a resort course. Jamie looked like she thought Jack was a pain in the ass. Rey looked like he thought the entire criminal justice system was a pain in the ass. Van Buren looked bored._

_Lennie didn't think he'd ever made such a big deal of anything as Jack made of everything. He agreed with Schiff. If the defendant's case for ineffective counsel was as bullshit as McCoy said, Lennie saw no reason to go ballistic._

_He told McCoy so. "If your Supreme Court case says what you say it says, I don't get what you're blowing a fuse about," His voice was level, but he felt sick. He had been quietly simmering for what felt like weeks now, a pot of water left to boil a minute too long. He'd been teetering on the edge, and now Jack's ranting or the clusterfuck case or something threatened to push him over. This tenuous feeling he disliked for the same reasons he disliked murders without motives. For most things in life, there were good, solid reasons for why they happened. Jack McCoy pissing and moaning wasn't a good solid reason for anything. Lennie tried to shake the feelings off. He almost managed but he still felt sick to his stomach. _

_"Oh?" Jack raised his eyebrows contentiously, being of the persuasion that he could blow fuses whenever he liked._

_"This isn't even my fucking problem," Lennie argued. _

_Something snapped. He felt it, a crack, a breaking glass inside him. It hurt so much it nearly brought tears to his eyes. Those he squelched, hard, forcing them back down. He wished he did not feel like he was going to puke. _

_"You know, we do have other cases we should be investigating," he muttered. _

_Another snap, and he succumbed to a bizarre terrifying feeling of not being in his right mind, the world spinning away from him. Where am I? he thought. What am I doing here? The image of a dark street and whirling blue and red lights flashed across his vision. Then his vision failed altogether. The office turned into a bright, fuzzy, white-yellow light. He was dizzy. He couldn't breathe. The nausea worsened. He had enough presence of mind and enough experience to know, sort of, what was happening to him, and he seized the nearest solid object, Rey's shoulder._

_And then he fainted dead away._

_When Lennie came to, he was lying on his back on the floor of Adam Schiff's office with his feet up on a chair. The voices of his colleagues were far away, and he couldn't quite make out who was who, but they sounded much more levelheaded than they'd sounded when they were discussing the case._

_"Is he breathing?"_

_"Yeah."_

_"Normally?"_

_"Seems to be."_

_"Heart rate's at eighty-four."_

_"Guess that's normal."_

_"A little fast."_

_"He'll be fine."_

_"He just fainted. People do it all the time around murder scenes."_

_"But Briscoe-"_

_"Sure it's not a heart attack?"_

"_Everyone here suddenly has a medical degree?"_

_"Well, he's breathing and his heart's beating, so you tell me."_

_"Never seen him do that. Have you, Detective?"_

_"No. But he's been sorta off for two weeks."_

_"Off? Like how?"_

_"Can't really say. And it's not all the time. Just sometimes, he kinda acts disoriented, then snaps out of it and seems okay. And he's been moody, I dunno, like irritable as well."_

"_More so than usual?"_

"_That's not funny, Jack."_

"_He didn't look well yesterday." _

_"He's not-"_

_"No. Not like that."_

"_Are you sure? Maybe you should talk to his AA sponsor."_

"_I'm pretty sure."_

"_Should we call the paramedics?"_

"_Give him a few minutes. He's not dying."_

"_I hope not!"_

"_Then we'll call an ambulance. Like if he's not all right in another minute or so." _

_They stopped talking. Reality became more tangible, and Lennie started to recognize voices again, and he heard Schiff say, "Just keep an eye on him." _

_Rey had his first two fingers pressed against the side of Lennie's neck, over the carotid artery, monitoring his pulse. When Lennie looked at him, he said, "Jesus Christ, Lennie. What the fuck? Are you okay?"_

_It was reassuring, in a way._

_And McCoy squatting down on his other side, fierce brows furrowed. "Do you know where you are, Detective?"_

"_The fucking DA's office," Lennie said weakly, wishing they would go away and leave him some space. _

_Van Buren immediately replaced Rey and chased Jack off with a lioness-like scowl. She told Lennie not to get up yet. People passed out all the time around brutal, ugly crime scenes, and Lennie knew what to do with them when they did. Why he had passed out in the DA's office perplexed the hell out of him, but he knew what to do, which at this point was keep lying on his back with his feet on the chair so the blood could go back into his head. He shut his eyes for a moment, listening to the din of voices from his confused colleagues._

_A few minutes passed. Lennie sat up. He took a few deep breaths, a sniff or two, rubbed his face with his hands. The first things that came back to him were the odors -- cologne, perfume, old leather, paper. After that, sounds -- people talking, papers shuffling, phones ringing. Smells and sounds, all evidence of life resuming._

_On realizing that Lennie wasn't dying, they had resumed discussing the case. "And if we go to trial," McCoy was saying, "I hope our evidence holds up if the son of a bitch doesn't testify."_

_"It's accomplice testimony anyway," Ross answered._

"_So it actually doesn't matter if he testifies or not." This coming from Van Buren. "Our case still sucks?"_

"_Yeah, that's pretty much it," Ross answered._

_Lennie slowly got up and with as much dignity as he could muster, climbed into the chair, his head still ringing like someone had fired a pistol in his ear. Yet he felt much better. At least the nausea had more or less passed. From the chair, he carefully stood up, and that was okay too, except he still felt detatched, everything inside him magnified and everything outside millions of miles away. The DA, the two ADAs, and Van Buren and Rey glanced at him, concerned, all of them asking how he felt. He told them he felt fine, a shamefaced lie since you don't faint dead away in the District Attorney's office if you're perfectly fine, and they knew it._

"_Do you want to go to the hospital?" Jack asked, trying his fierce, hawk-like best to look worried. "I'll give you a lift." _

"_No," Lennie answered. "It's all right."_

_No one looked like they believed him, _

_"Detective Briscoe, step outside," Van Buren said in a voice of mild concern inviting no argument._

_"I..." he began, recollecting his scattered thoughts, his head ringing, a knot in his throat, but Van Buren's stony gaze stopped him._

_"Detective," she repeated, her tone even softer, dangerous._

_Lennie was in no shape to protest, so he quietly stepped out in the hallway and rested his back against the wall, confused and worried. Shutting his eyes, he tried to remember what happened, but everything seemed foggy -- the drinking-too-much-the-night-before-feeling -- and all he knew was that he had been saying something to Jack, and then he had been lying on the floor. At the most grotesque homicides, he never flinched, while his fellow officers had to sit down and put their heads between their knees. Unflappable, that was how Lennie had always been. He was thoroughly flapped now, worried about his age, his lifestyle, worried about weird medical problems associated with that -- what if his heart or his liver or his brain or his lungs or his kidneys or something was on its way out? Years of bad marital stability and death investigations, you'd think, would have made him permanently averse to the temptations of "what if," but here it was again, one of those repeatedly unlearned lessons. It was such a mystery, this pain, these over-reactions. His head hurt. His belly hurt. His chest hurt. If could only go into a bar and then drink himself to oblivion, that time-honored manner of relieving emotional distress. _

_When the meeting ended, Van Buren was the first out of the room. She joined Lennie in the hallway and herded him down the hall and around a corner where they would be alone._

_"I have no idea what happened in there..." Lennie began._

_"I'll bet," she answered. "You started giving McCoy a hard time, then you sorta fell against Curtis' shoulder and passed out. You were unconscious for about fifteen seconds. You sure you feelin' okay?"_

_He debated how to answer that. The obvious answer was "No," but he knew if he admitted there was a problem, it meant there was a problem, and he wasn't sure there was a problem. If there was a problem, he didn't want to give it life and power by talking about it. Yes, he had fainted, but anything could have caused that. The weather, stress, anything._

_And he didn't believe that for a moment. Damned denial. His usual methods of damage control were undergoing a severe meltdown, from mild tremors three and a half weeks ago to this. The damage he was trying to control, he couldn't pinpoint -- only the fucking car accident came to mind, something that happened over a year and a half ago -- but his ability to cope with whatever needed coping was deteriorating._

_Van Buren solved his dilemma by answering her own question. "I think there's stuff going on inside your head that you don't know what to do with, or how to handle, Lennie."_

_"L-T," he smiled reassuringly. "I wasn't feeling so good today. My stomach was upset. Maybe lunch didn't agree with me-"_

"_You hardly ate anything for lunch."_

_He sighed. That was true. He'd had a lackluster appetite and stomach pains for the last week or so; yet another concern hovering threateningly in the back of his mind. _

_"Look, Rey was telling me-"_

_"Rey's been telling you what?" he snapped, stiffening his back._

_"Stuff I ought to know about," she replied, but he didn't really need an answer. He knew what Rey had told her. Looking straight into his eyes, she added, "You're gonna sit down with Olivet." Her tone was soft, but there was a no-nonsense edge in her voice all the same._

_"I guess that's more than a suggestion."_

_"Yeah, Detective. It is."_

A uniformed officer walked into the room, carrying two cups of coffee. His sudden entrance startled Lennie more than it reasonably should have -- his breath caught in his throat, his heart skipped a beat. After his heart rate dropped back to normal, he noted Olivet scrutinizing him closely. That was disquieting. What did the damned psychiatrist know that he didn't?

"Thank God for Van Buren," Liz observed, taking one of the cups from the officer, who set the other one down on the table, smiled sympathetically at Lennie, to the detective's annoyance, and then left.

"Yeah, right..." Lennie stared absently out the window and noted it was dark and snow had begun to fall.

"I'm serious," Liz said. "She's seen a lot. She knew what she was looking at."

Lennie smiled wryly and refocused his eyes on Liz. "I don't think it was as bad as everyone seems to think-"

"It was."

He sipped at the coffee that the officer had put on the table. This damned precinct coffee. Laying down the sarcasm thick, he sneered, "Objection, Your Honor, that's outside of the witness' personal knowledge."

Unflappable as ever, she pressed on. "You're worried about your health?"

"What?"

"You haven't really been eating all week, you're having dizzy spells, headaches, you fainted."

"Okay, a bit," he conceded. "You're gonna next tell me I'm imagining it, right?" He rested his forearm against his belly, as though it would quiet the internal squabbling in his guts.

"Not quite. But if you have all this going on in your head, it could be somatic."

"Hah," he grunted. Fuck your PhD. The lights outside glittered in his dark eyes. More psychobabble. The coffee churning around in his stomach was undeniably real.

"Are you in pain now?" she asked.

"A bit," he admitted. "I feel like crap to be honest." He paused, groping for better words to describe how he felt. "I feel like I have a horrible hangover I can't get rid of. It's like the shitty part of an epic night out, but without any of the fun of being off your fuckin' head."

"I see," she said.

Did she? Lennie could not see Liz Olivet as the sort of person who did all the things he did when he was young. Party, drink enough so you passed out somewhere, probably forget what you did, and cure the hangover the next day by doing it all again. It was all well and good until that lifestyle turned you into an alcoholic and suddenly you found yourself unable to have a night out (or in for that matter) and stay sober. All he said was, "I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining it. Then I'd imagine it better and we wouldn't be here."

"No, I'm sure you're not. I'm saying the cause might be psychological, rather than actual problems with your head or your GI system or whatever."

"Psychological? Then it's obviously a problem with my head, all right."

"You know what I mean. So how'd you cut your hand?"

That question again? "This is getting a bit redundant, Doc."

She leaned forward towards him. "You need to answer that question, Detective."

"What? I did. Hours ago." It felt like hours ago anyway. How long had he been here? He looked out the window again at the lights of the city glittering festively outside and the streetlights in front of the precinct illuminating falling snow.

Her face was as unreadable as any attorney's, when the lawyer doesn't want you to know how guilty his client really is. "I don't think that's what happened."

"Really? You were there?" He rolled his eyes.

She stood up and walked around the table to his side of it. He watched her suspiciously. His guts churned and twisted, worse than before, and tension knotted in his back and shoulder muscles. What in hell was wrong with him? Psychological, she said. He did not know what that meant or what to do. Tension and stress seemed to precede one of those damned panic attacks.

"I had the car door half-open. I slammed it shut, my hand was in the way-"

"You slammed it shut with some force."

He tilted his head to one side. "I work it out when I can," he quipped.

"You can't hide behind sarcasm forever."

"Aw, damn. I was hoping…." More sarcasm – it seemed the only way out.

Her face was smooth, indecipherable. A small smile played at her lips. "Right now, Lennie, you are so locked into damage control that you don't know what's going on inside of you. So you went to this concert-"

"You've diagnosed me in five hours?" he asked, caustic.

"I diagnosed you in five minutes. The concert?"

He swallowed the remainder of the coffee and leaned back in the chair. "McCoy had won his big trial..."

_Most of the time winning put McCoy, his predatory urges temporarily assuaged by the conviction, in an energetic, cheerful, albeit short-lived good mood. While the ADA was still high off of his victory, before the shit hit the fan on some other pending case, he could be a delightful companion. The man had enough energy to warm a New York winter, and he could be a lot of fun when he wasn't putting that energy into working all hours of the night or ripping heads off._

_Lennie guessed that McCoy had won his big case when the prosecutor called him at the precinct sounding exuberant and excited._

_"Detective, Bonnie Raitt's playing tonight at Town Hall, on 43rd. I know some people who can get us in. You and Curtis want to come?"_

_"I'll ask Curtis," Lennie replied, unsure if he wanted to go. His plans for tonight consisted of going home, eating whatever edible things he could find at his apartment, and then crashing in bed. Of course, he wouldn't sleep. His insomnia was worsening these days; not necessarily a bad thing since when he did sleep, horrific nightmares -- a problem he'd never had before -- woke him up, trembling and sweating, but nonetheless the sleep deprivation weighed down on him, another dead weight adding to the dead weight of whatever else was going on with him. Instead of sleeping, he lay around and used that deadly weapon of introspection to make himself miserable. Some nights, he watched TV -- Saturday Night Live reruns on cable or whatever else happened to be on. He'd never try sleeping pills. Those could be addictive -- hell, they'd killed Elvis among others -- and the alcoholism had been enough for one lifetime. He just suffered alone with his insomnia and SNL. Usually, he fretted for hours about work related bullshit, family related bullshit (his daughter Cathy was pissed off at him about something and wasn't talking to him right now) or the Goddamned car accident, thinking if only he hadn't decided to watch that execution, if only he hadn't taken the rest of that day off, if only he hadn't been dumb enough to get wasted off his sorry ass that night, Claire Kincaid wouldn't be dead._

_If only, if only, if only... Life was full of 'if only's'. You could spend hours compiling a list as long as New York's penal law to account for all the 'if only's.' Too bad life was a one shot deal, that you only learned how not to screw up after you'd already screwed up irreversibly._

_On those nights, the endless war against the drink came perilously close. How easy it would be to get blind drunk, numb the pain, and just stop fighting. You don't win the war, not ever. Lennie always felt like he was reaching for some half-remembered shore in his life, before he fell into a bottle. You don't win the war, you win battles. Each day. Each week. Each month. Your will against your addiction. Some days the only thing you wanted was to give in, raise the white flag. But you couldn't. You had to convince yourself why it mattered that you stay sober and hold your life together, a hell of a thing to convince yourself of when your kid hated your guts, your job exposed you to the worst of humanity, you didn't think it made a difference one way or another to the people around you that you stayed on the wagon. AA said it did. Screw AA. Damn, he must be in bad shape, he was thinking of blowing it all again. Like he hadn't learned from the last time he fell off the wagon._

_Lennie had been through so much over the years; two divorces, his children's contempt, the addiction, the subsequent job turmoil, endless death, the dregs of the City, and bullshit on top of all that like the Hellman Commission investigating him because a corrupt cop whom he'd nearly put away for murder felt vengeful, or his old friend and partner Logan suckered into punching a guy out and got his sorry ass demoted, or other colleagues, guys he'd known for years, being killed on the job, breaking down from the stress, or sucked into the maw of corruption. Now this. How many times did you have to come back to it before you couldn't stand it? It seemed like his ability to do so was growing weaker rather than stronger. Fuck this shit._

_Stick to the SNL reruns._

_What would be the point of spending yet another night engaged in lonely morbid introspection? He liked Bonnie Raitt. He liked that soulful, bluesey rock'n'roll. He might feel better if he went to the concert. Anyway, if he were with friends, he wouldn't end up in a bar. And if Jack was in a good mood, it might be fun. But the thought of going to the concert aroused some inexplicable anxiety, a warning in his gut that he should not go, a vague fear he could not explain. Coping with Times Square -- there was a reason to avoid 43rd, not a good one by any means, but a somewhat justifiable reason. The throngs of people, cars, and neon lights viciously sucked out your energy. Lennie already had none to spare; he was completely drained. He didn't feel up to dealing with the insanity of Midtown on a Friday night._

_"Well, Detective," said Jack impatiently._

_Of all the things to be afraid of, a concert in Times Square should not be of them. He was a cop, for God's sakes, and worrying about that was patently ridiculous. "I'll go," Lennie said to Jack, then covered the mouthpiece of the phone and asked Rey if he wanted to go. He'd be damned if he succumbed to bizarre, irrational feelings, especially now, since McCoy must already believe that he was losing his mind._

_Rey, thrilled to find any excuse to put off coping with his marriage situation, happily agreed to go. Lennie knew the game well: a night out with colleagues allowed him to avoid his wife while at the same time providing a decent excuse to her for not being home suffering the mother of all guilt trips. _

_"Concert starts at seven-thirty," Jack said. "Lets meet at Town Hall at six and then we can go find a place to eat in that neighborhood."_

_"Like we can afford the restaurants down there," Lennie said, half serious and half jesting. "On cops' salaries." That meant spending some time wandering around Midtown on a Friday night hunting for a restaurant. The mere thought of the noise and the lights and the people launched a throbbing headache._

_"I won the case," Jack replied. "It's on me."_

"What was it?" Lennie asked.

"What?" Liz raised an eyebrow at him.

"You said you diagnosed me in five minutes. What was it?" He tilted his head imperiously.

"Oh. You have post traumatic stress disorder." Her tone was nonchalant and unemotional. She could have been saying taxicabs were yellow.

"PTSD?" he smiled, an incredulous sort of smile not touching his eyes, and he nervously fussed with his police academy ring. PTSD? Butterflies fluttered uneasily in his stomach. He could not have that, not because of a damned car accident or anything else he had done during the past year. "That doesn't sound like something a New York City police detective should have. I had a case a couple years ago, where this guy was PTSD. I mean he was a Vietnam vet. He went totally nuts and killed his damn wife. I'm not... Are you sure about this?"

"I'm sure."

"It's the holidays. It's always a lousy time of year for me." He fought to convince her, and himself, that her diagnosis must be wrong, because he was an old police detective who had seen everything and he wasn't that crazy. "Cathy's gone off talking to me right now. I get a bit depressed or whatever, or think about goin' back on the sauce, but it's just how things are sometimes, you know."

"You're textbook. The irritability, the flashbacks, all the physiological symptoms you've described to me, the fact you can't remember the accident… But you don't need to look so panicked about it. It's not career-ending. It's not necessarily a chronic mental illness. It's curable."

"'Not necessarily?'" He cocked a doubtful eyebrow at her. "Fucking hell."

"It's treatable. With this psychotherapy. Or anti-anxiety drugs like Prozac or Paxil can help manage it a bit, but I know you well enough to not think you'd want that."

"How about a heavy dose of valium?" he cracked.

"With your history I'm not sure any narcotic would be a good idea-" she began and cut herself off, realizing he did not mean that seriously.

"Look," he stood up, rubbing his forehead, pacing around the room, and eventually he settled on the ugly green sofa. "I know I've been giving you wiseass answers, and you want me to discuss my feelings-"

"No, Lennie, I don't want you to discuss your feelings." Now she sounded like Jack McCoy in witness prep for a shaky case. "What I want you to do, right now, is remember the details of the accident without flashbacks and other physiological symptoms. You can't remember it very well-"

"No kidding. I'd had more than a few drinks."

"-Because your brain has blocked it out, to cope. Avoidance. Drinking has nothing to do with it."

"I'm sure you'd know-"

"Look, Lennie." For a second, her emotions shone through her placid exterior; she looked as exhausted as he felt. "You may have been very drunk but I doubt it was enough to forget what you did. You were playing pool in that bar and winning. Your hand-eye coordination must have still been okay."

"I'm a high-functioning alcoholic," he said. "I can do a lot even when I'm totally fucked."

She took a different tack. "Do you think you had so much to drink you blacked out? You would know better than anyone what you can handle."

He blinked and looked at her, at a loss for a wiseass reply. Then he rested his forehead in his hands. Had he? "I had three or four vodkas. Maybe a beer as well."

"Is that enough?"

"I was far from sober." He kept his face buried in his hands and eyes shut. His breathing was fast, too fast, and he tried to slow it down.

"Far enough to black out?"

"I don't know." Sure, he had gone years without a drink and his body did not have the tolerance it used to, but it did not seem like that much. "Didn't used to be." She was wearing him down.

The bar he remembered with perfect clarity. He remembered feeling depressed and upset, because of the execution he'd witnessed and because his daughter, who hated his guts, had basically told him to fuck off. He remembered walking into that bar without giving much thought to whether he should walk into a bar while depressed or not. He just did it. He remembered discovering Jack McCoy there, drunk as a coot; he remembered McCoy leaving, saying something like, "There's no law against taking a cab while intoxicated. And to hell with her." He remembered responding with something like, "To hell with all of 'em," and then giving up on sobriety, life, and asking the bartender for a straight double vodka. He remembered shooting pool, he remembered Claire Kincaid walking in, looking for Jack, wearing jeans and a leather jacket, her hair disheveled. He remembered her offering to drive him home because he was pretty smashed. Everything after that that became hazy and then indiscernible.

"Do you remember being in the hospital later?"

"I wish I didn't. That was one of the worst nights of my life."

"So it's only the wreck itself you're struggling to recall."

"The hospital was later," he argued. He didn't even know why he was arguing about this anymore and he was feeling so worn down. "Nothin' like ambulance ride to sober you up." He sighed, folding his arms over his gut, which at this point felt like it had completely stopped working. "I'm a New York City police detective. You know, I'm trained... I should be handling this better."

"Nobody trains you to be a victim."

"If I were to be going crazy from PTSD in potentially life threatening situations, you'd think I would have done that already some time in the past thirty years. And I deal with death all the fucking time."

"It's different when it's someone you know. And in the sort of situation where it was nothing more than chance that it wasn't you. Had you ever been in a bad car wreck before?"

"No."

Olivet looked at him serenely. And she changed the subject. "So you went to this concert in Times Square..."

"Yeah..."

"Was it any good?"

"Bonnie Raitt. Yeah, she's good."

_As soon as the band started to play, it gnawed at Lennie's brain. His stomach was acting up again as well. He had felt ill since dinner, where he hardly ate anything, and the short walk from the cafe on 8th and 43rd to Town Hall had exhausted him. Too many flashing lights, too much noise, too many people. Goddamned Times Square. He felt detached from the music, from his friends, from the world in general. His mind wandered to old days when he could freely slip into drunken oblivion and forget about all the bullshit. There is something to be said for the way drinking creates illusions and fantasies and distorts one's vision. Now he was just Detective Briscoe, seeing straight, supposedly in his right mind._

_As he watched the concert, Lennie became less and less certain of that. The world became distorted of its own accord without any help from the old Chivas bottle. Everything shattered into pieces at painful angles, jabbing into his insides._

"How'd it start?" Olivet asked.

"How'd what-"

"You know what I mean."

Yeah, he knew. He couldn't articulate it, though. The ringing sensation in his head started, like he was going to pass out again. "I don't know."

She waited, patient, expecting him to know.

"I was just sitting there."

"Yeah?" prompted Liz.

"I don't know. I was... I can't think...." His tongue felt thick and swollen.

"You can. What happened?"

He shook his head, sinking into the sofa, digging his fingers into his temples. He'd been right; the shrink was going to force him to talk about stuff he didn't want to touch with barge pole. Now, he sensed she would not back off from these questions.

_Lennie just sat there, listening to a mournful blues song. For the first thirty seconds of the song, he actually enjoyed it in spite of the twisted feeling inside. But then, he knew something was very wrong. His heart started pounding and his chest felt constricted so he couldn't breathe. A rush of adrenaline slammed into him, screaming and rattling, like a runaway subway train._

"How'd it start?" repeated Liz, the epitome of tranquility.

Dismayed, unable to articulate, Lennie just looked hopelessly at her.

"You had an adrenaline rush," she supplied. When he squinted at her, confused, wondering how she could know that, she continued, "And it didn't stop."

He nodded.

Liz said, "Then what happened?"

_Lennie's muscles froze. He couldn't have moved if he had wanted to. He stared at the band on the stage, but he didn't hear them anymore. He was far away, in a car, sitting next to Claire Kincaid, sailing across an intersection. Brakes squealed wildly. Then a worse screech, a harsh, grinding noise. Metal striking metal at high speed. Lennie was thrown abruptly forward, the seat belt cutting into his shoulder and gut. Everything spun around, so fast._

"I couldn't make it stop," he whispered, shutting his eyes against the pain.

_Drunk and dazed, Lennie staggered out of the car into the pouring rain, limped around its mangled front end to the driver's side, and peered through the shattered windshield. Claire's head lolled to the side and there was blood. She was dead. Oh, God. Lennie had seen so many dead bodies that even wrecked as he was, he knew it then and there. For a few minutes he stood there, stunned, crying, staring at the car. Claire was dead. His fault, his fault, his fault. Why wasn't he dead? He deserved it more than she did. The car, it was a mess, the whole left side crumpled, the windshield smashed, glass everywhere. So was the SUV that hit them. Why in hell wasn't he dead? That amount of force... The car had spun three hundred-sixty degrees. He shouldn't be standing here. He was a disaster, an alcoholic -- fuck the whole "recovering" thing - and he was alive and Claire was dead. A life full of potential, put out, just like that, while he, who had drowned all of his potential in a bottle years ago, was standing here in the middle of an intersection, plastered, mindboggled, gazing at a mangled car and the mangled body of a colleague, his head spinning, and mother of God, how the fuck did this happen?_

_His blood pressure bottomed out. He stumbled to his knees on the hard pavement and vomited all the vodka shots he'd drank that night out on the asphalt. Maybe he called 911, maybe someone else did, but he heard sirens wailing, and they were coming closer. He lay huddled on the asphalt; he knew he was in shock, trembling badly, cold, his vision failing, dizzy, and the sirens were coming closer. Then someone was putting a blanket over him and rolling him onto his back, tying him onto a back board, and all he saw were the flashing lights, and he heard voices yelling, but they were far away and all Lennie heard were the sirens..._

"I couldn't make it stop," he repeated, sitting on the couch, holding his face in his hands. His eyes burned. Was he shaking? If he fainted right now, wouldn't that make Olivet's day.

"No, you couldn't," Liz agreed. "Like I said, you're locked into your coping mechanisms. We need to get you to remember it to control it. But we're not there yet. One step at a time. Now, what happened when you went home that night?"

Lennie put his hands down on his knees and said aggressively, "I told you. I was shutting the door on the damned car-"

She rose from the table, joined him on the sofa, and said, "Can you honestly tell me-"

"-And my hand got in the way-"

She raised her voice above his. "Can you honestly tell me, Detective, that when you learned that King's County DA killed himself, you didn't wonder if you weren't suicidal too?"

The question startled him, like a gunshot. He looked straight into her impenetrable eyes. "It never occurred to me."

"Really?"

"Do I gotta spell it out?"

"He had the same birthday as you-"

"So, what?"

"You didn't wonder why-"

"Sure, I did. So did Rey. You gonna drag him in here next?"

Ignoring him, Olivet said matter-of-factly, "You had a flashback at the DA's the day before. Uncued -"

Confused, Lennie squinted at her. "Uncued?"

"Nothing caused it. With the others, something caused it."

"Which was?" he prompted, raising an eloquent eyebrow. This game of dragging vague psychobabble word by word out of Olivet was exhausting, more exhausting than it should have been because it should be no more onerous to him than dragging a confession out of a recalcitrant suspect, but there it was, fatigue and distress pounding down on him.

"What do you think it was?" she asked.

"How am I supposed to know, Doc? You're the shrink."

Olivet let that go. "You didn't know when they'd start, you couldn't control them." She saw he was visibly upset and put a hand on his forearm, saying, "Focus on breathing, like from your diaphragm. You'll be all right."

"Oh, God knows," he said despairingly, the weight of the world on his shoulders now. He was fucked up. He felt really fucked up. But he thought about sucking air into the bottom of his lungs, like she said, because he did not want to pass out again or have another panic attack.

"You will. Just bear with me a little longer, okay? How long were you drinking?"

"Like twelve years," he said tiredly.

"Never a DUI or anything like that."

"I knew when I shouldn't drive."

"Which was why you didn't drive yourself to the concert on 43rd. You didn't feel well, you were worried, you didn't feel safe behind the wheel. So you took the subway."

Lennie swallowed and held his breath, waiting for the shoe to fall, like a cross-examination going very badly.

"You didn't slam your hand in a car door. You weren't using the car."

No wiseass response came to mind. He noticed his heart thudding against his ribs, so loud he wondered if Olivet heard it.

"Jack and Jamie said they walked you to the Times Square station-"

"You talked to Jack and Jamie?" was all Lennie could say.

"You'd had an attack at the concert. What happened when you came home?" Her hand remained on his arm, a tenuous connection to reality.

_The anxiety attack at the concert had left Lennie exhausted. Jack, Jamie, and Rey knew that something was wrong -- Lennie must have looked like he'd been dead for three days. He felt that way, like an MTA bus had hit him. He had very little to say to anybody -- unusual for him -- his muscles quivered, his heart raced, he felt sick, dissociated and scattered. As soon as the concert ended he raced into the toilet and puked up whatever he had in his stomach, which wasn't much anyway. Shaking, he leaned against the toilet, clutching it as if he'd fall through the floor if he let it go. When he came out of the john and his friends looked into his eyes, they saw a wildly desperate and exhausted look they'd never seen there before. The neon signs, sirens, throngs of people, and horns jarred his senses and he had to lean against a Miss Saigon poster on the side of a building for a second, reorienting himself and pulling his act together, or he would have gone down on his knees, right in the middle of fucking Times Square. Rey, worried about his partner but perpetually terrified of what his wife would say if he was out five minutes later than his ETA, said he had to go home, but he would call Lennie later, and he turned towards one of the parking garages on 44th and Seventh. Jack and Jamie flanked Lennie, supporting him, afraid he might fall._

_"How about I give you a ride home?" suggested Jack._

_"I'm fine," Lennie said, waiving dismissive hand. "I'll be fine on the train."_

_Skepticism shone in the prosecutor's glittering eyes. Grimacing, he whispered something to Jamie that Lennie could not hear, and Lennie didn't give a damn anyway. He was past caring; he only desired to go home._

_"Why don't we walk you to the subway station?" said Jamie._

_"It's a free country."_

_The 42nd Street station was a block away from Town Hall. With the prosecutors on either side fighting off the crowd, Lennie trudged to the station, each step an effort, but he did not falter until he had to climb down a flight of stairs into the station. Jack, his brows creased with concern, an emotion he did not often express unless a case was about to derail, grabbed his arm to steady him and said something along the lines of maybe Lennie should spend the night at his place. But Lennie recovered his balance, made it down the rest of the stairs without mishap, and, assuring the attorneys that he would be fine, left them standing at the turnstile eyeing him doubtfully. But they let him go._

_A hazily recalled subway ride later, Lennie stumbled wearily into his apartment. He took off his sport jacket and tie, and sunk down on the couch, rubbing his face. He tried not to think, but he still heard the sirens and the music and all he could see when he closed his eyes was the mangled heap of metal and the flashing lights of police cars. His lower back was giving him a little pain so he lay down, trying to rest, but the panicky feeling didn't stop. Godammit, he'd had it with this. Looking back now, while he lay on the couch, his head buried in his forearm, Lennie saw how everything that had happened in the last three or four weeks had somehow conflagrated into this. He was not functioning. It was not good. All he could see were blue and white lights and himself shivering in the rain beside a horribly mangled car. Or the images flickered and then he was in a car being flung violently across the road, spinning around, hearing the sickening crunch of metal and glass. He was desperate for the sounds and images to get the hell out of his head. Frantic, he got up, paced around his apartment, only it got worse, not better. The adrenaline rushing through his body in stifling waves made him want to climb the walls, and in a helpless effort to rid himself of the feelings and images, he, without a thought, shoved his hand through his apartment window. The jarring sound of shattering glass startled him out of whatever panic he was in. The adrenaline stopped. Dizziness swept over him. His head spun. His stomach felt as if it was inside out. His breath sobbed in his throat, ragged. It was all he could do to stand. He blinked and looked at his left hand, bewildered by the blood flowing down from the laceration, covering his wrist and forearm. For a moment, he didn't feel a thing, and then it hurt like hell._

_The phone rang._

_He couldn't have answered that phone if someone had put a gun to his head and demanded that he do it._

_It rang again, and again._

_It sounded less like a phone, more like a siren._

_Lennie, dizzy, trembling, and weak, as though suffering from the worst hangover, ever, unplugged the thing._

_The sirens, for the moment, ceased._

"Okay then," said Liz, folding her file and stuffing it into her black leather bag.

"Okay then?"

She smiled, accomplished and satisfied and somehow sympathetic at the same time. "We're done."

He eyed her dubiously. "I'm cured?"

"No, of course not. But you're closer than you were."

"I put my hand through a window," he said, incredulous, not believing for a moment that he was closer to anywhere, just like that.

"I've seen worse," she replied, her voice almost cheery.

"So you're sayin' I'm better off than a guy who's on his way to a _M'Naughton _hearing. Great." He massaged his forehead wearily. "Guess you gotta draw a bottom line somewhere."

"It's not like that, Lennie. Lots of people suffer from mental distress at times. It doesn't suddenly make you incompetent to do your job or mean you're weak or anything like that. Sometimes we don't handle trauma very well and need some help. That's all. Anyway, I'll give you the number of a therapist you'll like-"

"Why not you?"

"We work together. Anyway, call this person after the holidays. If you don't, this won't go away, and it'll probably get worse again."

"When will I be cured?"

She smiled an enigmatic, disingenuous psychiatrist smile. "It'll take as long it takes."

They stood up at the same time, Liz packing her things away and Lennie watching her, his head clearer than it had been in a month, more muddled at the same time, and doubting his own good judgment and general sanity. Fucking PTSD. Him of all people.

"You said something about cues earlier," Lennie said. "What cues? Like catching a case where a DA with my birthday offs himself?"

Olivet tossed her hair out of her eyes and smoothed it out with the hand that wasn't holding her briefcase. "I wouldn't worry about that. That didn't start it and won't set it off."

"Then what did?"

"Who knows in some cases? But once it starts, you start responding to environmental cues with flashbacks, hypervigilence, avoidance behavior, other symptoms. With you..." she paused, like a prosecutor preparing to paste a witness with that final disastrous (for the defense) point, and then said, "It was the music. I know this is going to sound bizarre, but right now, in your head, music sounds like- "

"Sirens," Lennie said, leaning slowly against the wall, his voice soft. "Are you saying I can't listen to music without going nuts?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because, Lennie, and you should know this, we get better."

He nodded. Yes, we get better. Time heals most anything, given enough time and enough patience to let Time work her magic. How many long nights had he held on to tenuous strands of hope with his fingernails, waiting for time to heal some wound or another? He'd buried his wounds in cynicism, and as superficial as that might seem, hell, he was still here, basically functional, a third-grade homicide detective in the NYPD and good at his job, better than a lot of people he had seen come and go over the years.

He'd always had an uncanny tenacity for getting better.

Olivet shrugged on her jacket. Lennie's was probably still slung over the back of his chair in the squad room.

"Goodnight and take care," Liz said as she walked out the door.

For a moment, after she'd left, Lennie loitered in the room, alone for the first time all day, He wondered if you woke up in the middle of your own autopsy, would it feel anything like today had felt? The stress, the panic he had felt half an hour ago, had gone, but left him utterly drained. It was like he had seen his guts spill out on the floor and was looking disinterestedly at them now, too tired to care.

As your mind is wont to do when you pause in a silent room and think, his wandered. Lennie remembered a story McCoy had told him once, how a defense lawyer was crossing Rogers the ME, and he asked her, "Mr. Hunter was dead at the time you examined him?" and the ME had answered, "No, you dumb asshole, he was sitting there on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him." Lennie shook his head, reaffirming to himself why he hated therapy and therapists -- AA didn't count -- and why he'd never actually seen one on his own volition. On the other hand, God knows where he would end up if he didn't fix this. He turned to leave, glancing quickly at the old file cabinet, verifying that there were no important announcements on it.

Tomorrow, tomorrow life would go on as usual, as if nothing had ever happened, as if today had been a blip in the normal course of events, just as the car accident had been a blip in the normal course of events. Life goes on. All Lennie ever knew about life was it took more strength to survive the more you knew.

Everything was quiet -- he could hear the soft sounds of the night shift shuffling in the squad room, praying as they always did for no major disasters until morning (nine o'clock would be nice), and the hushed whoosh of cars passing on the street, and an occasional distant siren.

Outside the interview room Anita Van Buren waited on a bench, reading a case file. She nodded a greeting to Liz, then immediately joined Lennie.

"How'd it go?" the L-T asked him. "It must have been rough. You look exhausted."

"She says I have an eating disorder and a phobia of wig glue and hot water bottles," he quipped.

"Yeah?" Van Buren snorted, waiting for the real answer.

"I didn't cut my hand on a door," he said, staring down at the floor, and then meeting her eyes. "I broke a window in my apartment." He exhaled and added sardonically, "What's a little PTSD?"

"It's okay," was all she said, squeezing his shoulder as if she'd known all along. She looked at his left hand. "Did you wrap that yourself?"

"Yes..."

"Thought so. Rey'll take you to the emergency room. Make sure you don't need stitches or anything like that."

"Rey's still here too? Geez, I would have imagined that you guys had something better to do."

"We were worried about you, Detective," she said at the same time Rey came out of the squad room with his jacket and Lennie's jacket. Rey looked exhausted, dead tired of worrying about his marriage, which was tenuous at best, of worrying about his partner, who appeared to be going over the edge, of worrying about his life in general, which looked worse and worse every day. Lennie knew the look. He probably looked that way himself half the time -- a bottom-line objection to life in general.

In any case, Lennie wondered why Rey had stuck around, instead of going home to make amends to Deborah. Did Rey really give a shit about him? Sometimes he wondered if his intense, serious partner even liked him. Van Buren on the other hand was everyone's mother; the type of mother who doesn't believe you're competent to make decisions on your own even when you're fifty-eight years old. Unlike almost every other male commanding officer Lennie had ever had, who never gave a damn about your general well-being so long as you seemed more or less functional on the job, Van Buren concerned herself with the general well- being of everyone in her precinct. A female thing, Lennie was sure. The matriarch of her tiny corner of the world indeed.

The three cops went out the door together, silently. Outside the precinct, the night air was cold and crisp, the snow wafting about in a light breeze, and the city lights glittering. Van Buren said, "I'll see you two tomorrow." To Lennie, she whispered, "And you'll feel better tomorrow. And all of us are here for you, don't you forget it, Detective." She smiled and turned around, walking up 125th Street, in charge. Van Buren was always in charge.

Lennie and Rey went the opposite direction. Lennie felt somewhat comforted in what Van Buren said -- she wasn't about to fire him or do anything more unpleasant than she'd already done, making him spend an entire day with Liz Olivet, who he'd rather not talk to, talking about stuff he'd rather not talk about.

He looked at his injured hand, which still hurt, hurt worse in fact, but the emergency room? He'd cleaned it off thoroughly, wrapped it up, and acetaminophen did wonders for the pain. The wound hadn't looked that deep.

"Is it absolutely necessary for me to go to the ER?" Lennie asked. In the emergency room, you inevitably found yourself waiting hours for them to stabilize some gunshot or car accident victim before they ever got to you.

"Are you a doctor?" Rey raised an eyebrow.

"No-"

"Then you're going to the ER."

A block down 125th, they passed an a capella group singing Gospel carols on the front steps of a church. Some perverse desire for self-inflicted injury stopped Lennie, and he listened, his eyes half-closed, waiting for his heart to race and for the adrenaline to kick off. Before such a thing could even begin, Rey put a hand between his shoulder blades and pushed him forward, smiling that smile completely illuminating his dark, severe face.

"Come on, Lennie. Lets go."

And they went on, past the singers, into the snowy New York night.


End file.
